Corona Calls for 09.30.2024 – COVID and the brain

KPFA - Corona Calls

Discussed in the episode:

• Two new studies are out on the long-term impacts of COVID on the brain: the first tracked impacts on people with COVID severe enough to require hospitalization, and found cognitive deficits equivalent in magnitude to 20 years of ageing; the second studied the impacts of deliberately (!) exposing young, healthy volunteers to the original strain of the Sars-COV2 virus, and found measurably worse cognitive performance in the ones who contracted COVID a year after they were infected.
• A new paper casts more light on why COVID immunity doesn’t seem to last very long: neither vaccination, nor vaccination plus natural infection, induce the body to make the long-lived plasma cells which produce neutralizing antibodies for Sars-COV2. (High antibody levels can prevent an exposure from turning into an infection, whereas T-cell immunity — which does endure after vaccination — is more helpful at stopping an infection from becoming life-threatening.)

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Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

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