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Comment by codesections | Hacker News Reader

Results: The study shows ~1 IQ point decline for non-hospitalized Covid patients.

Full table:

  Covid, no respiratory difficulty: 0.4 IQ point loss
  Covid, respiratory difficulty, no home assistance: 1 IQ point loss
  Covid, respiratory difficulty, with home assistance: 2 IQ point loss
  Covid, hospitalized, without ventilation: 4 IQ point loss
  Covid, hospitalized, with ventilation: 7 IQ point loss

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I wonder if you can even reliably measure a 0.4 IQ point loss. Factors such as aging, changes in environment, perhaps even work from home will act as confounding influences.

On the other hand, 7 IQ point loss on ventilation does not surprise me as much. Being in a half-suffocated state for weeks must have some adverse effect on oxygen-hungry brain.

My follow-up question is how damage accumulates. We're on-track for COVID19 becoming a thing, where we'll catch mutations over and over and over.

We’ll know afterwards.

Or, if the cumulative effects are bad enough, we won't know.

There's never been a disease that's that bad, fortunately.

The black death came closest, but I feel it's safe to say COVID is nowhere near that.

> I wonder if you can even reliably measure a 0.4 IQ point loss.

Which is why one never ever trusts an article or paper with a bare number as claim. Confidence intervals, p-values, standard deviation, whatever it is, there are ways to tell whether it's significant or what the odds are that it's noise.

I haven't read the article btw so I don't know if it does, but since we're talking about a bare number, the answer to your question is that it indeed by itself doesn't tell us anything about measurability even if it had been five points.

I'll take the 1IQ loss if it means society can stop this health theater farce. I've probably lost more than that already from the lockdowns.

Well, the important question is whether the number of deaths and total number of IQ points lost in case of "stopping this theater" would be better or worse compare to the points and lives lost caused by the "theater".

That's only The important question if quality of life is not a factor in your calculations. We could make all speed limits 5mph and save a lot of lives, but there are more important things than lives, and societies have all agreed about that.

Not so bad for the worst disease in history I guess?

COVID might be the worst infectious disease in recent memory, but it is far from the worst disease in history.

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