How Covid-19 Affects the Brain, During and After Sickness
The virus’s mental health impact may mean a secondary epidemic
Once Katie Swanson’s lips and eyelids turned blue, she stopped being able to sleep. The 28-year-old has always been “great at sleeping,” she says — an early-to-bed and early-to-rise type of person — but the coronavirus had her oxygen levels cratering, and she knew they might drop more as she slept.
“I was too afraid because I thought I wasn’t going to wake up,” Swanson says. “I was fully convinced I would die in my sleep.” Weeks after the peak of her illness, she’s still restless. “Every single night I have to take melatonin now,” she says, and that doesn’t always work.
A profound anxiety around sleep is one of a long list of mental symptoms Swanson says she experienced alongside the physical ones as she battled a case of the coronavirus severe enough to hospitalize her twice. And while her breathing has improved considerably—and her face is now a normal shade—the mental recovery has been much slower.
“My memory is really bad,” the California native says. “For a while, I couldn’t think of really basic words or definitions. I went weeks without talking to anybody because it was too much work.” It’s much more than the “brain fog” that can often accompany a bad cold or…
