Covid survivors say ‘brain fog’ has impaired their ability to function normally

After contracting COVID-19 in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier.

Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her coronavirus symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognise her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot.

Lisa Mizelle, a veteran nurse practitioner at an urgent care clinic who fell ill with the virus in July, finds herself forgetting routine treatments and lab tests, and has to ask colleagues about terminology she used to know automatically.

It is becoming known as Covid “brain fog”: troubling cognitive symptoms that can include memory loss, confusion, difficulty focusing, dizziness and grasping for everyday words. Increasingly Covid survivors say brain fog is impairing their ability to work and function normally.

“There are thousands of people who have that,” said Dr Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious disease at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, who has already seen hundreds of survivors at a post-Covid clinic he leads. The effect on the workforce that is affected is going to be significant, he added.

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Source: The Irish Times, 18 October 2020