Regardless of whether it's covid or capitalism, this just further increases my suspicions that people around me are losing their damned minds.
The tests here are simple reaction time and "number vigilance tests" btw. Not sure what that second one actually is.
number vigilance tests
Participants view a stream of digits presented in the middle of the screen, one at a time. A new digit is presented ~750ms (for a presentation rate of: 80 words/minute). Whenever the digit is the same as the target digit (which is presented on the right of the screen throughout the task), they have to press the Spacebar. Otherwise they are instructed to not do anything but stay vigilant and wait for the next digit.
So it's a combination of visual processing, short term memory, and reaction time.
Yeah, but it's also meant to measure impulsiveness. It's a type of Go/No Go test. They're not just measuring how fast you respond when you're right, but your ability to stop yourself when the answer is wrong.
This is pretty wild. So like potentially 20% of people who’ve caught COVID, and are not obviously afflicted with long COVID symptoms, are experiencing cognitive issues 2 standard deviations from the control?
Worldometer puts the total number of COVID cases at 702million. I don’t know how to say if that’s accurate or if it double counts repeat infections, but that would be at least 140 million people out there with significant cognitive impairment over the course of the pandemic. And that number is probably a little low, since I don’t know how to account for the people who went on to acquire long Covid compared to just contracting covid. Overall I’d guess the numbers are much more than that, since the accounting has almost always been low.
One thing that would have been interesting to know from this study, if they had access to this info, is if there were correlations to different variants. Ie, beta caused a lot of impairment, omicron less or vice versa. As well, would be useful to know how single infections can multiple reinfections compare.
