It's Friday, October sixte. I'm Oscar Emiras from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. Scientists are looking into what's becoming known as COVID brain fog. These are lingering symptoms of memory loss, difficulty focusing, dizziness, and even grasping for everyday words. Some COVID survivors say that it's impacting their ability to work and function normally.
Pam Bellic, health and science writer at The New York Times, joins us for what to know about COVID brain fog. Thanks for joining us, Pam, happy to be with you. You know, as we go through this coronavirus pandemic, we hear a lot about the symptoms and the after effects after somebody has healed from COVID nineteen. One of the things that's becoming more evident we're seeing a lot of
people is called COVID brain fog. So these are cognitive symptoms that people are experiencing memory loss, confusion, difficulty focusing, dizziness, and even grasping for everyday words. I think there was a surveyors soon to be published Serve they where this was the fourth most common symptom that people were reporting after recovering from COVID nineteen, So Ham tell us a little bit about COVID brain fog, and then the people that you spoke to, you know, how are they going
through all this? Yeah? Well, I think that this is going to be a phenomenon that we are going to see a lot more of as people recover from the physical symptoms of COVID. And as many people as I found who were expressing this as a problem for them,
I think they're sort of just the tip of the iceberg. Frankly, because many of the folks who are experiencing this right now are people who weren't necessarily all that physically sick, and they feel like, hey, no, I'm ready, I should be able to get back to work, and they find
that they can't. These are people who are lawyers and managers and nurses who just find that they can't focus, they can't multitask, they have short term memory loss, all sorts of aspects of infusion and disorientation that is just
kind of debilitating. And for just one example, a nurse who is featured in my article, she longtime nurse has been working for an urgent care clinic for a long time, clearly knows what she's doing, and yet she goes into an exam room for a patient and leaves the room and can't remember what the patient just told her and is forgetting to order routine lab tests or even sort
of medical terminology. She told me that she sort of tries to kind of sidle up to colleagues and say, hey, what's your favorite treatment for that, even though she knows full well, like she should certainly know, like the back
of her hand, exactly what the treatment was. Unfortunately, you know, to her great credit, she's been very honest with her clinic about this and has asked them to make sure that she isn't scheduled on a shift alone, and her colleagues have been helping her out, so she's being conscientious about it. But she doesn't have any more kind of medical leave to take because she used it up to deal with the physical symptoms, and so she's at work.
And that's just one example. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because we hear about some of these longer term effects after you recover from COVID nineteen, things like losing your taste and smell takes a little while. They come back. Being lethargic takes a little while to bounce back from. And now this is another one where you just can't
operate the same way. And doctors scientists don't really know what causes this brain fog, but they suggest it might have something to do with how the overactive immune response affects the body, the inflammation and blood cells, lining of the blood vessels. This is kind of a thing where we that we kind of keep following about COVID nineteen that it's more than just a respiratory disease. I think that's a really key point that you've made here, which is basically sort of the lack of a good sense
of what is causing this. And I think again that's going to end up being significant because with the respiratory symptoms, with some of the cardiac symptoms, some of the physical law logical effects, they can be very serious, of course, and people are going to be recovering from them on their own timeline, and and some people will have a harder time than others. But these are generally issues that
doctors know how to deal with. Neurological issues are a little bit more nebulous, and especially when we don't know the exact cause. So there's virtually no evidence that the virus itself is penetrating the brain, and so there has been some i think misinformation out there about that, and that's really not happening, certainly on any kind of widespread scale. So it's not like your brain is being destroyed. The listeners should rest easy about that. What's this seems to be.
The neurological effects seem to be basically a consequence of the way that your body is reacting to the virus. So when you get the virus, your body mounts of immune response, and as we've seen with some of the physical symptoms, the immune response itself, for some people can get so activated that it can cause more physical problems
for you than just the virus itself. Well, they think that there may be some kind of corollary to that happening neurologically, and some people their immune response gets so activated to try to defeat this new, unknown viral enemy
and then just has possibly some trouble shutting off. Or it could be that there are kind of little fragments of viral genome kind of still hanging around in some of yourselves, and so your immune system is not getting the shut off signal, and that could be something that's affecting what's going on with these neurological symptoms. It is all sort of tied up with fatigue, which is something
that you mentioned. There's could be interplay with the body recovering from if you have, say, still have some kind of shortness of breath, that could be giving your body more stress and that could be making it harder for you cognitively as well. It's just a complicated in a play of things, and it's unlikely that there's gonna be kind of a pill you can take that you're going to be able to get your focus back just like that. And that's why I think it's going to end up
being a really significant for people and for the economy too. Yeah, and I imagine it's just very frustrating for people who have gotten over this. You know, maybe they've got in their negative tests and he's just lingering effects. There's somebody you spoke to for the article that says, I've become angry when people talk to me because it hurts my brain to try and pay attention, and you know, frustration over forgetting things. There was somebody that forgot their twelve
day vacation in Paris. You know, these things are probably contribute to the kind of just exasperation from all this, so definitely something more that they need to look into. COVID brain fog. Pam Bellic, health and science writer at The New York Times, thank you very much for joining us. Oh thank you. I'm Astar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast
every monthy through Friday. So fall Alison, I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast.