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I had a disturbing conversation with my doctor the other day. I had gone to see him for a minor ailment when suddenly he started asking me about some kind of herbal pill.
“What?” I said without understanding. You know, she said, the ones I told you to buy from the health food store and that you told me worked well.
“I did it?” I said, sure that the poor man had confused me with a patient who believed in homeopathic nonsense.
“You did it,” he said, turning to his computer screen to read an exuberant email I had sent to thank him for recommending an herbal tablet that I had called a “welcome welcome” success.
When they came back to me, I asked him when I had sent the email and in an instant everything was revealed to me. It was 2019, before the first pandemic lockdown began in the UK almost exactly four years ago.
For reasons I can’t fully explain, the events of my life – and my work – during that time can sometimes still seem like they happened at least ten years earlier.
Likewise, I’m surprised to learn that meetings or trips that I would have sworn happened last year have actually taken place as early as 2021.
The way our sense of time has been warped during the pandemic has been well documented around the world. The Italians thought that time was dragging on. Some Britons thought it was accelerated. In the Australian state of Victoria, a lockdown hotspot, researchers compared the distortion to jet lag.
But it’s been almost a year since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 was no longer a global public health emergency, so shouldn’t we have reset by now? Not necessarily, say the academics.
Covid has left a “long tail for society” that continues to influence how we value and perceive time, says Ruth Ogden, professor of the psychology of time at John Moores University in Liverpool, UK.
His research during the pandemic showed that more than 80% of people in the UK felt time was passing faster or slower than normal, partly depending on how sad, bored or happy they were.
But the distortion was also caused by the way the pandemic upended the routines that helped anchor us in time, he told me last week. So not remembering when and what I had told a doctor about a herbal pill may not have been surprising after a period of “all is lost in time.”
I hope he’s right because other researchers have just found less pleasant explanations for poor post-pandemic memory, such as a loss of IQ.
Mental confusion is a complication of Covid that has been well documented, especially for those suffering from long Covid whose symptoms last for months.
But a study published last month suggests that even people who fully recovered from what seemed like a mild dose of Covid may have suffered a cognitive deficit equivalent to three IQ points, compared to someone who was never infected.
The discovery surprised the authors of the research, which had limitations. The Covid patients’ results were compared not with their past scores but with those of people who had never been infected.
However, other scientists have made some disturbing calculations about the study’s findings. The average IQ in the United States is about 100, says longtime Covid expert Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, and an IQ below 70 generally suggests a level of intellectual disability that may require “significant social support.”
He estimates that a three-point downward shift would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ below 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million, meaning 2.8 million more adults need of a lot of social assistance.
This is a potential problem, for the adults themselves and for their relatives or carers.
And it is just one of the many after-effects of the pandemic that deserve attention. These include the impact of remote work on the US commercial real estate market, where the owners of a New York building recently sold their stake for just $1. Or the effect of lockdowns on students, young and old. Or the growing use of digital technologies spurred by the pandemic.
This is not an exhaustive list of problems and obviously the lasting effects are nowhere near as severe as the grueling Covid crisis that triggered them. Ultimately, this is something we must never forget.
pilata.clark@gmail.com