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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.

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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.

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