Even mild Covid-19 can cause your brain to shrink

I have 3 vaccines and after the third, around 16 days later, got covid. So much mental fuzziness.

After recovering I got covid again (assuming omicron) and recovered.

My word recall is absolute garbage. My memory of the first quarter of the year is fuzzy. Otherwise I am doing OK and seeing improvements. But I know conversations with me are painful when I cant come up with the right words.

I like how on the front page this is currently right next to:

"The brain expands and shrinks over time"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31048591

I didn't suffer any obvious cognitive problems after Covid, but I had a lot of muscle twitching, and while it slowly receded, my right eyelid is actually twitching a little right now.

I have never had anything like that before, and my life isn't very stressful. It is some kind of nerve damage. And my cardiologist has the very same symptoms.

While neurological problems are an undeniable and perhaps the scariest aspect of COVID infection (aside from death), I wonder if sometimes the problems with word recall are simply caused by the long-term lack of social contacts.

My own social interactions have dropped drastically since the beginning of the pandemic (which I believe is a common feeling) and it causes two things; first, I don't use exotic words in conversations so often, causing true recall problems, and second, I have forgotten how difficult word recall sometimes was even pre-pandemic.

As is common with probabilities, some of the problems are explained by the two factors stemming from isolation alone, while others are caused by COVID infection. I wonder what the portions are.

Another gem from the article right at the bottom

>Although COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective in protecting against serious illness, they do not protect against "long COVID" in people who become infected despite vaccination.

Archived: https://archive.ph/wnW75

So covid-19 relieves brain inflammation? Cool!

Since when is the nationalgeographic a serious scientific publication?