Note that the scary big figure there is for people who were hospitalized and needed ventilation. The figures for “just getting COVID-19” are much smaller.
Hospital, ventilator: 0.47 SD (7 IQ points)
Hospital, no ventilator: 0.26 SD (4 IQ points)
Stayed at home, needed medical assistance for breathing difficulties: 0.13 SD (2 IQ points)
Stayed at home, breathing difficulties, no medical assistance: 0.07 SD (1 IQ point)
Stayed at home, ill, no breathing difficulties: 0.04 SD (0.5 IQ points)
I find it slightly suspicious how close each figure is to being half its predecessor :-).
I would absolutely not want to lose an IQ point, but I am quite certain that my effective IQ varies by much larger figures depending on how I’ve slept, how stressed I am, ambient temperature, time of day, etc. And while the authors of the study do seem to have taken some trouble to try to disentangle the effects they’re looking for from things like pre-existing conditions or ongoing COVID-19 symptoms, these effects seem small enough that I wouldn’t be super-confident of any such study’s ability to disentangle those things adequately.
To be clear, I’m not claiming that the effects aren’t real. (Especially the dramatic ones for people who had to be hospitalized.) But this study doesn’t make me very confident that mild cases of COVID-19 are likely to do much harm to the brain.
Note that the scary big figure there is for people who were hospitalized and needed ventilation. The figures for “just getting COVID-19” are much smaller.
Hospital, ventilator: 0.47 SD (7 IQ points)
Hospital, no ventilator: 0.26 SD (4 IQ points)
Stayed at home, needed medical assistance for breathing difficulties: 0.13 SD (2 IQ points)
Stayed at home, breathing difficulties, no medical assistance: 0.07 SD (1 IQ point)
Stayed at home, ill, no breathing difficulties: 0.04 SD (0.5 IQ points)
I find it slightly suspicious how close each figure is to being half its predecessor :-).
I would absolutely not want to lose an IQ point, but I am quite certain that my effective IQ varies by much larger figures depending on how I’ve slept, how stressed I am, ambient temperature, time of day, etc. And while the authors of the study do seem to have taken some trouble to try to disentangle the effects they’re looking for from things like pre-existing conditions or ongoing COVID-19 symptoms, these effects seem small enough that I wouldn’t be super-confident of any such study’s ability to disentangle those things adequately.
To be clear, I’m not claiming that the effects aren’t real. (Especially the dramatic ones for people who had to be hospitalized.) But this study doesn’t make me very confident that mild cases of COVID-19 are likely to do much harm to the brain.