I don’t see why both our assertions can’t be true. But I’m also willing to bet that most people in your life have long since returned to business as usual in regards to their social lives and have all but forgotten about the very real and long term threat of COVID. In the process, they have likely contracted it, numerous times, as it has become endemic in populations around the world.

Though with this return to normalcy, people should expect normalcy to return. For countless many, especially the vulnerable and marginalized, people who do not have adequate access to care and community, it hasn’t.

Smarter people than I can walk through the impacts of COVID, the illness, on society at large. On an individual level the cognitive impact of COVID is something that is verifiable and has a growing body of evidence. I know it’s a difficult reality to face that there is still a global pandemic. One with a pathogen that has been shown, time and again, to cause systemic damage to the body, including the brain.

This is not a fantasy, overblown, fear mongering. The disease is real, it is not over, and there are in fact many more diseases old and new who affect the human body in ways scientists have yet to fully understand. Our “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” mentality in modern society doesn’t reflect reality. What doesn’t kill you leaves you with scars. COVID does, on almost every part of your body.

Part of the social structures you’re referring to that could help mitigate the sheer devastation caused by diseases is universal healthcare, more medical research, public health messaging. None of these serve the profit of the ruling class though. They would rather convince us that disease is something that can be solved with over the counter medicine.

And if you can’t afford that then you’ve failed as a person. And if you find yourself being more forgetful, less sociable, having trouble articulating thoughts, well then I guess you’re just not trying hard enough. These are misattributed condemnations. We should be blaming disease. Diseases the ruling class does not care to stop.

It is a bold claim that a disease which is proven to cause brain damage, evade immunity, and mutate rapidly may have affected your cognitive ability around/after '22 when everyone was told COVID is over and it's cool to take the masks off with no evidence of its eradication or even effective long term treatment? Is it really?

I will back you on this, this started happening to me before I ever got COVID. And then the subsequent burnout that happened for me when everyone was "getting back to normal" and I simply could not readjust like neurotypical people did made it even worse. I won't deny that COVID could be playing a role here but it's also explainable based on what was going on socially/societally.

Could be both. Trauma causes the integration of the brain to be more difficult due to dissociation which means attention/conscientiousness is much more difficult.

I’m not gonna deny your personal experience because I’m not you. But I honestly don’t think it’s helpful to have a chicken or the egg discussion about a disease that has clear links to cognitive impairment. My child has a heart condition that to the best of their cardiologists’ knowledge is not known to have a causal link to COVID. We hadn’t contracted COVID either by the time they were admitted to the hospital for acute myocarditis, which COVID can cause. My partner and I have had many sleepless nights wondering if we could have given them COVID asymptomatically and that could have precipitated into their condition. And it took a long time for us to realize that the cause doesn’t matter. What matters is knowing the threat now and protecting ourselves from it.