mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

373K
active users

I was poking around after a few conversations about driving/parking being worse now than pre-covid and it looks like about a quarter of people who’ve had mild covid may be experiencing visuospatial deficits?

Maybe there are problems with this paper that I’m not seeing but this seems potentially relevant to the traffic safety conversation.

nature.com/articles/s41380-022

NatureSelective visuoconstructional impairment following mild COVID-19 with inflammatory and neuroimaging correlation findings - Molecular PsychiatryPeople recovered from COVID-19 may still present complications including respiratory and neurological sequelae. In other viral infections, cognitive impairment occurs due to brain damage or dysfunction caused by vascular lesions and inflammatory processes. Persistent cognitive impairment compromises daily activities and psychosocial adaptation. Some level of neurological and psychiatric consequences were expected and described in severe cases of COVID-19. However, it is debatable whether neuropsychiatric complications are related to COVID-19 or to unfoldings from a severe infection. Nevertheless, the majority of cases recorded worldwide were mild to moderate self-limited illness in non-hospitalized people. Thus, it is important to understand what are the implications of mild COVID-19, which is the largest and understudied pool of COVID-19 cases. We aimed to investigate adults at least four months after recovering from mild COVID-19, which were assessed by neuropsychological, ocular and neurological tests, immune markers assay, and by structural MRI and 18FDG-PET neuroimaging to shed light on putative brain changes and clinical correlations. In approximately one-quarter of mild-COVID-19 individuals, we detected a specific visuoconstructive deficit, which was associated with changes in molecular and structural brain imaging, and correlated with upregulation of peripheral immune markers. Our findings provide evidence of neuroinflammatory burden causing cognitive deficit, in an already large and growing fraction of the world population. While living with a multitude of mild COVID-19 cases, action is required for a more comprehensive assessment and follow-up of the cognitive impairment, allowing to better understand symptom persistence and the necessity of rehabilitation of the affected individuals.
Dawn Ahukanna

@kissane @inthehands
The timing also makes me wonder about embodied deskilling/forgetting from a lack of regular practice for over a year or two.

Driving a car requires ongoing intuitive, somatic, probabilistic physics calculations -
1. how much force to apply to accelerator to get the car to certain speed
2. calculating separation to not hit the car in front
3. whilst visually sub-second scanning to update a memorized, time series model of the space to your back, left and right via mirrors.

@dahukanna @inthehands Yeah, I’ve been assuming that the bad during during year one and the bad driving after are…not necessarily the same people or kinds of error/carelessness, even.

@kissane @dahukanna
Totally agree. And more broadly, there’s just a mess of potential causal factors here that are near-impossible to disentangle:

• COVID damage to brain

• Loss of driving practice

• Disruption of routine causing anxiety, sleep loss, etc

• Same but for economic downtown, job loss

• Same but for living through a resurgence of fascism

• Trauma of living through the largest mass death event in the US in living memory with minimal acknowledgement / processing / healing

@kissane @dahukanna
Like…I don’t think science, punditry, or our own community conversations have begun to get a grasp on just how much the past 3–7 year have screwed us all up.