We did it, we normalized brain damage!

The upshot: There may be no correlation between the severity of your COVID case and the lasting effect on your brain. You thought COVID felt like having a cold? Great, but you still may not know what the virus has done, or is doing, to your body. “Acute COVID-19 is a respiratory disease,” Koralnik says. “But long COVID is mostly about the brain.”

And plenty of people are developing it. Long COVID is now the country’s third leading neurological disorder, the American Academy of Neurology declared in July. As of the end of May, there were 82.5 million COVID survivors in the United States, and 30 percent of them — about 24.8 million — were considered “long-haulers.” A recent study of Northwestern’s Neuro COVID-19 Clinic patients showed that most neurological symptoms persist for an average of nearly 15 months after the disease’s onset.

The vaccines are certainly helping. Before they became available, about one-third of everyone infected with the virus came down with long COVID, Koralnik says. “There is brand-new data showing that if you’ve been double vaccinated and boosted, then the risk of developing long COVID, if you get COVID, is probably more like 16, 17 percent.” That’s the good news. The bad news is those 1-in-6 odds still translate to a lot of people: For every million vaccinated people who get COVID, 160,000 to 170,000 will develop long COVID.

“A lot of people think, Well, COVID is going away. But in fact, it’s not,” Koralnik says. “People still get COVID after the vaccination and double booster, and they can still get long COVID despite that.”

1 in 6 odds of getting long covid after vaccination, and we are looking at getting infected several times a year, with compounding damage each infection.

Back to brunch, people! :joker-amerikkklap: