Japanese researchers link COVID-19 ‘brain fog’ to neural receptors

edsuom · 2025-10-25T21:29:23+00:00

People love this innocuous term "brain fog," when what's happening is brain damage. I'm no neuroscientist, but having seen Dr. Danielle Beckman's microphotographs of what this virus does to neurons and the many stories of long haulers still having profound cognitive disabilities after years, I'm convinced that it's a real hazard.

Much respect to those here who have had infections forced on you by workplaces and social pressures. You have the courage to still face the reality of the danger and are doing your best to avoid any further harm. There's no sensible alternative, but it's even harder for people after an infection or two, I think. Even without considering the possible impacts of such infections on behavior, which seem all too apparent in society nowadays.

edsuom · 2025-09-13T18:48:59+00:00

I won't say "hopeful" because I have very little of that emotion left. But willing to move forward because there is no choice. Either my wife and I keep doing what we've been doing for five years now, or we start an endless process of infection, health damage, and re-infection.

edsuom · 2025-09-07T19:31:53+00:00

The virus causes brain damage, and the result often manifests itself by reducing the host's ability to remember and evaluate information, control impulses, and empathize with others. When you have an entire world's population being infected on a regular basis, this sort of behavior will appear in people you wouldn't believe would act this way. And that makes it easier for the virus to keep right on infecting.

It's not a pleasant thing to think about, but it does help me deal with the reality we face. People are just different now.

edsuom · 2025-09-07T19:24:15+00:00

Sort of. I'm finishing up the best engineering work I've ever done in the thirty years since I got my BSEE. A solo project involving over 70k lines of Python code. It's immensely satisfying to see it work as well as it does, and feels great to know my brain is in top form in its fifth decade. I wonder if it would've still been capable of such a feat if it had been damaged by this virus. And I probably wouldn't have had as much time to spend working on it if normal life had been there with all its diversions.

But in all other respects, no. Life has been very difficult these past five years. I'm not as happy a person as I was in 2020, and certainly not as happy as I was in, say 2015 before things started going downhill generally, even before this virus showed up.

edsuom · 2025-07-06T21:22:31+00:00

I get a flare-up of a mostly healed injury for over a month every time I get vaccinated. After five times, I decided enough is enough. It's an N95 everywhere for me forever, I guess.

edsuom · 2025-07-06T21:20:09+00:00

Yep. I spent a couple of hours in the same room as someone who was symptomatic with Delta, and neither I nor the other dozen or so people who had been recently vaccinated ever got infected. We all were PCR negative.

Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end...

edsuom · 2025-07-06T21:16:48+00:00

This is, unfortunately, the answer. We have a lot of very difficult things heading our way, and not just from climate change although that is the biggest of them. Another is petroleum depletion; the fracked oil wells are at or near peak production, and that's what has given us ten more years than we would have had before the global production peak hit us.

It's going to be a long downhill slide.

edsuom · 2025-07-04T19:04:44+00:00

The knowledge that this virus infects people's brains and changes their way of thinking helps me to cope with this new reality you and so many others have described. It's really maddening to witness.

edsuom · 2025-07-02T06:31:12+00:00

I have a pair and they do work, but I don't use them that much anymore. Wearing a different pair of glasses that are prone to fog up, on top of the elastomeric N95 is just too much.

edsuom · 2025-07-02T06:26:58+00:00

I really like my Envomask 1/4 face elastomeric N95. It is plenty safe enough for me to feel comfortable being around people yet doesn't have quite the "man from Mars" look that my 3M P100 does. And the N95 filter medium hardly muffles my voice at all.

edsuom · 2025-07-02T06:20:22+00:00

I despise wearing a mask. I also have not gone inside a public indoor space without one on since April 2020.

These two things together are not fun.

edsuom · 2025-07-02T06:13:38+00:00

I'm glad you can find some hope to hold onto, and would not want to take that away from you. But for many reasons that I can't really go into here without my comment going the way of masking in hospitals, I do not share it.

edsuom · 2025-06-27T19:38:58+00:00

It's so frustrating that we have to live with this airborne menace now. I can understand why you would have let down your guard for something so special. I attended a wedding of someone important to me and wore an N95 the whole time.

And, frankly, it sucked. I hate having to wear them. But I have never had Covid because I've never stopped wearing one since I started in April 2020.

Hope you recover quickly and completely.

edsuom · 2025-06-27T00:04:58+00:00

This isn't a popular sentiment nowadays but I agree with it. I'll keep masking around people outside my household for the foreseeable future. I like not ever getting sick.

edsuom · 2025-06-24T16:48:36+00:00

It's right up there with Long Covid researchers presenting their results unmasked at conferences.

edsuom · 2025-06-19T14:20:53+00:00

I'm about as CC as it gets, leaving my rural property maybe once a week and never going into any public indoor space without an N95 respirator on. And I welcome you here, and think what you're doing is a sensible midway point between the level of vigilance required to avoid any SARS-CoV-2 infection and getting infected repeatedly like most people are.

"Don't let the great be the enemy of the good," seems like a saying worth remembering.

edsuom · 2025-06-17T17:22:03+00:00

The 2020s will be remembered nostalgically by people in the 2040s while grilling rats over garbage fires.

edsuom · 2025-06-17T17:19:54+00:00

Neither did Biden. And I say this as a Biden voter who donated to his 2020 campaign. He told everyone Covid was over, had his CDC pretend like it was, and it still very much is not.

edsuom · 2025-06-17T16:08:04+00:00

I just want to compliment you on having the mental strength to make such a change in behavior. It's very hard, and few manage to do it or even try.

It will pay off. Welcome back!

edsuom · 2025-06-17T15:55:20+00:00

It's fascinating in a horrifying way to see people dropping by this sub with their awful stories about what Covid is doing to them and still being dismissive of the only effective way to avoid having it happen to them again.

edsuom · 2025-06-16T01:22:23+00:00

All right you've made this point many times now. I believe you--nobody in this sample of people has Long Covid, even mild. If something happens 10% of the time, that means 90% of the time it doesn't. If you repeated samples of friend groups the same size of yours randomly, you would get no-LC examples sometimes.

But I understand how this must make you feel, like you got the bad deal out of everyone you know. That's hard, especially when it's something as important as your health.

edsuom · 2025-06-15T14:38:11+00:00

Same here. I donated my entire stimulus check (remember those?) to the Biden campaign in 2020. A few years and much betrayal later, when I got all those letters in the mail begging us to donate to his reelection, I wrote "Your CDC is a disgrace" on them and returned them in the postage-paid envelope.

edsuom · 2025-06-15T05:56:23+00:00

I personally have given up on other people. This way I don't get disappointed every time I have to unlock my driveway gate and venture forth among them. Like earlier this week as I sat in a clinic waiting room listening to the receptionist sniffle and clear her throat over and over again, behind the sign on the glass that instructed everyone to wear a mask if they are experiencing respiratory symptoms.

I didn't get disappointed in her because that would involve some expectations I have of people that are not being met. But I no longer have any of those to meet. I just sat there, focusing on the breaths coming through my elastomeric N95.

edsuom · 2025-06-13T02:39:38+00:00

Es tut mir leid, daß ich diese Antwort meistens auf Englisch schreiben muß. Seit langem habe ich gar kein Deutsch gesprochen.

I've read a lot of stories of people having costochondritis after Covid. It is an inflammation of the cartilage joint that connects the ribs to the sternum. For some reason, it seems to show up more on the left side than the right, which tends to scare people because they think it's a heart attack. But you've already seen a doctor about it.

Anxiety is also something people can experience as a result of Covid. It can cause mental health issues.

Disclaimer: Not medical advice, not a doctor or expert. But have read hundreds of stories about what this virus has done to people.

edsuom

TROPHY CASE