HOW COVID ATTACKS THE BRAIN

GABRIEL DE ERAUSQUIN FIRST BEGAN to worry about the long-term impact of COVID on the brain when he read early reports out of Wuhan, China last January that survivors had lost their ability to smell and taste. To a neuroscientist like de Erausquin, the sudden loss of two of the five senses was a “red flag.”

His worry soon turned to alarm. One of his medical residents, a young mother in her early 30s diagnosed with COVID-19 who’d experienced respiratory complications, fever and exhaustion, was forced to quarantine away from her young children in a hotel room for a month. As her acute symptoms began to fade, what troubled her most about the experience was not the separation itself, she told de Erausquin, but how she felt about it—she felt entirely detached.

“Cognitively, she realized that she should have been more concerned about her children, she should have been more concerned about her work,” recalls de Erausquin. “But she couldn’t care less. She had the lack of smell, the lack of taste and this profound emotional distancing, which bothered her a lot. It’s very hard to explain that kind of emotional detachment, emotional dissociation, without having something going on in the amygdala.”

The amygdala is a region deep inside the brain that’s considered the seat of emotions. For de Erausquin, an expert in neurodegenerative disorders at the University of Texas Health Center at San Antonio, these and other observations about the link between COVID-19 and brain disorders has become more urgent over the past year. Patients who had seemingly recovered from COVID-19 and were long past the age at which schizophrenia would be expected to manifest were experiencing psychotic breaks. Other patients reported strange neurological symptoms—tremors, extreme fatigue, phantom smells, dizziness and bouts of profound confusion, a condition known as “brain fog.” Reports in medical journals began piling up, showing these problems extend far beyond Texas. In one