But as two new studies published in the past week show, severe COVID isn’t the only risk faced by those with the disease. New findings in JAMA Psychiatry find that levels of mental illness such as depression, anxiety and self-harm are elevated after a COVID-19 diagnosis. Additionally, a new study published in Scientific Reports found that patients who lost their sense of smell after a COVID infection saw long-term structural changes to their brains as well as a tendency to more impulsive behaviors.
What! Wow. I didn’t know that, you’re telling me now for the first time.
To mice, it rewires their brains so they spend more time in dangerous places and are more likely to get eaten. It’s a good strategy that unironically will make covid spread more. Not that it’s had long enough to develop that as a specific “strategy” insofar as evolution “strategizes”, it just stumbled upon it.
I’ve read it destroys their natural aversion to the smell of predator urine, too.