[danielheath]

Wild to me that the first mention of COVID is this far down the page.

Most people have been infected at least a couple of times may this point, and at this point it’s very well documented to cause lasting cognitive decline.

[watwut]

The actual article (not the blog post) does mention it as likely partial cause.

[sigmoid10]

This thesis contradicts the chart though. Why would older people be much less affected and the generation 70+ even show a negative trend if these people were far more likely to experience a more severe disease progression? You would expect them to be hit at least as hard (if not harder) as young people from those long term memory effects. The trend for the youngest age group also starts well before 2019.

[watwut]

First when you have combination of factors, this can happen.

Second, old people were more likely to die on covid. Kids were getting covid too, just not dying and long term covid consequences were observed in then. It can easily be that where old person died, young ended up with long term consequence.

There is no reason to assume the effect would be uniform accross generations.

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Either way, cell phone obsession and "rewiring of biology" claims are wven further from anything shown in the article. They are both purely what HN and the blogger want it to be.

[sigmoid10]

I don't see your argument. Are you suggesting that covid pruned old people with weak memory to the point that it improved their memory on average? Because that is the only conclusion of your argument combined with the data. And that's not just completely unfounded, it's a pretty wild violation of Occam's razor.

[instagib]

In my family, people 70+ stop using mobile phones or never used them in the first place.