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Covid and The Brain
Over a year ago, COVID-19 shut down the United States, along with the rest of the world. There have been over 135 million cases worldwide, with nearly three million deaths. The virus has deeply impacted our jobs, schools, relationships, health, and brains. The impact on people’s brains has been two-fold: striking them physically and emotionally.
Physical:
By now we are all quite familiar with the typical symptoms: fever, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, and loss of smell/taste, among many others. At the beginning of the pandemic, COVID was just understood as a respiratory illness, however over the last several months, scientists have come to realize the serious physical impacts it may have on the brain.
What Do We Know?
So far, the most common neurological side-effects of COVID-19 have been a loss of smell/taste, stroke, and delirium. But how does this happen? Doctors and researchers have roughly divided the neurological impacts of COVID into three stages, which are organized by frequency of occurrence. Patients may experience some, none, or all of the symptoms associated with these stages.
Stage 1:
This stage includes the loss of smell, taste, or both. While we may not always consider it, the brain is actively involved in processing taste and smells. When…
