The headline is broadly defensible, but the qualifications matter. Effect sizes vary by population, the strongest claims rest on shorter trials, and credible voices push back on how it's typically framed.
Another study used imaging data and found that people who had COVID-19, both severe and mild, lost a significant amount of gray matter in several brain regions compared to shortly before they had been infected with SARS-CoV2 (preprint).
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Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
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There's a pre-print that has not been peer-reviewed yet, and it's a big study that was done out of the U.K. It's part of this ongoing study called the Biobank Study. They get large population sample sizes. In this case, it was close to 800 people. It was 780 or something like that people before the pandemic came in and had MRI brain scans. Researchers have all this data on individuals', you know, brain structure and volume. And so once the pandemic hit, many people came down with COVID-19, some mild cases, some more severe, some were hospitalized. And a few months, you know, into the pandemic, researchers doing this Biobank study thought, "Hey, we should bring these people back in and get a brain scan and see if there's any changes." And so that's what they did. Just, you know, months after their first scan, they brought them back in for another scan. And what the preliminary findings, again, that are not peer-reviewed yet, showed is that there are major differences in gray matter regions of the brain. Gray matter atrophy is occurring in several different regions of the brain, very prominently in the olfactory region, which makes sense because, you know, one of the telltale symptoms of COVID-19 at least pre-Delta was loss of smell, loss of taste. And also there's atrophy in other brain regions involved in memory and learning.