Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up for the Work & Careers myFT Digest – delivered straight to your inbox.
The other day I had an uncomfortable conversation with my doctor. I had gone to see him due to a minor illness when he suddenly started asking me about some kind of herbal pill.
“What?” I said frankly. He said, you know, the ones I had you buy at the health food store and that you told me work well.
“I did?” I said: Surely the poor man has confused me with a patient who believes in homeopathy.
“I did,” he said, turning around his computer screen to read a gushing email I'd sent thanking him for recommending an herbal pill that she called a “welcome” success.
With flashes of memory returning, I asked him when she had sent the email, and in an instant everything was revealed. That was in 2019, before the first pandemic lockdown that began in the UK in nearly four years.
For reasons I can't fully explain, events in my life—and my work—at that time can still sometimes feel almost as if they had happened at least a decade earlier.
Likewise, I'm amazed to learn that meetings or trips that I could have sworn happened last year actually happened in 2021.
The way our sense of time has been distorted during the pandemic has been well documented around the world. The Italians thought it was too long. Some Britons believe that the matter has 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 the coronavirus no longer a global public health emergency, so should we be recalibrating now? Not necessarily, academics say.
Ruth Ogden, a professor of psychology of time at Liverpool John Morris University in the UK, says Covid has left a “long tail of society” that continues to influence how we value and feel about time.
Her research during the pandemic showed that more than 80% of people in the UK felt time was passing faster or slower than usual, partly depending on how sad, bored or content they were.
But the distortion was also caused by the way the pandemic upended the routines that helped anchor us in time, she told me last week. So not remembering when and what you told your doctor about herbal birth control pills is perhaps not surprising after a period where “all was lost in time.”
I hope you're right because other researchers have just come up with less plausible explanations for impaired post-pandemic memories, like IQ loss.
Brain fog is a complication of Covid that has been well documented, especially for those suffering from the hell of long Covid whose symptoms last for months.
But a study published last month suggests that even people who fully recovered from what looked like a mild dose of Covid may have experienced cognitive deficits equivalent to three IQ points, compared with someone who was never infected.
This finding surprised the authors of the research, which had limitations. The results of Covid patients were not compared with their previous results but with those of people who had not been infected at all.
However, other scientists have made some troubling calculations about the study's results. The average IQ in the United States is around 100, and an IQ below 70 generally indicates a level of intellectual disability that can require “significant community support,” says Dr. Ziad Al-Ali, a longtime COVID expert.
It is estimated that a three-point downward shift would increase the number of US adults with an IQ below 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million, meaning an additional 2.8 million adults would need a lot of welfare.
This is a potential problem for these adults themselves and for their relatives or caregivers.
It is just one of many epidemic impacts that deserve attention. They include the impact of remote work on the US commercial real estate market, where the owners of a building in New York recently offloaded their stake for just $1. Or the impact of closures on students, young and old. Or the increased use of digital technologies stimulated by the pandemic.
This is not an exhaustive list of problems and of course the lasting effects are nowhere near as bad as the exhausting Covid crisis that it has unleashed. Ultimately, this is something we should never forget.
pilita.clark@gmail.com
