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.