And then lead poisoned voters with poor cognitive skills are more easily manipulated into voting against their own interests or their poverty is used to polarize the rest of the electorate and achieve the same outcome.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
or that survivors have a range of cognitive impacts, none or only some of which could be the equivalent of 7 iq points?
In an exceptionally misleading way:
> > COVID-19 survivors also have reduced cognitive abilities, equivalent to about 7 points on IQ scale,
Failing to mention that one key thing:
* He uses "COVID-19 survivors" -- which it sounds like that's everyone who's infected-- to refer to patients who were on a ventilator.
Further, despite attempts at case control, I really doubt the comparison population is well matched to those who actually ended up on a vent.
It's unsurprising there's a decent sized effect for those who are hospitalized in intensive care: this is known in general. And it may be a bit overstated here because of confounds.
> but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection (N = 326)
I think it applies to everyone?
Average across the COVID patients weighted by prevalence of outcomes (to match the overall population's COVID experiences) is more like 0.5-1.0 IQ points. And some or all of this effect may be generated by confounds.
I'm just saying that:
* The claim that there's a 7 IQ point drop from being a COVID-19 survivor is completely bogus, unless you're only a survivor after being on an ventilator.
* The effect size and causative relationship are dubious, because the controls and matching on this study are imperfect. There's plenty of opportunity for significant confound. E.g. if dumb people were more likely to not take precautions against getting COVID, it would look like getting COVID was associated with lower cognitive performance in this study.
It's a very interesting study, with laudable measures taken to overcome confounding factors. But I imagine the authors cringe when someone flogs it around as "COVID-19 reduces your IQ by 7!!!!!"
It's true that the paper appears to show cognitive differences lasting months among some subsets of people with previous COVID-19 infections in the UK. It is not true that the paper asserts that being a "COVID-19 survivor" reduces IQ by 7.
This is not only not "basically verbatim", but not among the assertions made by this paper.
* Only the patients on a ventilator showed an effect anywhere near "7 IQ points" --- which was not a metric measured by the paper, but if we're going by about 1/2SD-- (n=44, not 80000).
* The P values are impressive, still, but that doesn't mean that the control population chosen to be "like' the ventilator patients is really equivalent.
* We already know that being in critical care or on a vent is bad for cognitive performance afterwards. Indeed, we know that being sick in any way is bad for cognitive performance for some time afterwards.
This study was great because they had data from before COVID that was just part of the Bio Bank, so they were able to review participants already in the bio bank based COVID status. 394 COVID patients and 388 controls. Based on a small sample size of only 15 that were hospitalized, it also appears to increase grey matter loss based on severity, although sample size is not large enough to say so conclusively.
Ostensibly true for those on ventilators. However, IQ is normed to those who are the same age as you. So if being on a ventilator also takes a couple decades off your life expectancy, then there isn't necessarily any difference, at least if you think of yourself as being a couple decades older.
Smart voters wouldn't allow executive orders, forever wars, bank bailouts, hackable voting machines, winner takes all voting, the destruction of environmental regulations, subsidies to fossil fuel, unwinnable cold wars, outsourcing of all manufacturing, stagnant wages despite record productivity, record inequality, pandemic profiteering, opioid crises with obvious correlations, the smearing of heroes like Assange, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
The fact that most rural areas are also conservative is neither here nor there.