Calling an account a “doomer” because it describes an ugly reality is like blaming the mirror for what it reflects. Have you looked around lately? Doomerism is fatalism. It says catastrophe is inevitable. Nothing can be done. Nothing matters. Why bother? That is NOT the same thing as saying: Climate change is already here. Some additional damage is now unavoidable. And what we do from here will determine how much worse it gets. COVID is still circulating. Reinfections are still occurring. People are still dying and becoming chronically ill. Long COVID is real. Viral persistence, immune dysregulation, vascular injury and neurological abnormalities are not inventions of pessimistic Twitter accounts. Some consequences of the choices we’ve already made are now baked in. But the magnitude of what happens next is NOT. People miss this. Wearing a respirator matters. Cleaning indoor air matters. Reducing transmission matters. Vaccination matters. Climate mitigation matters. Adaptation matters. Policy matters. A doomer says: “We’re doomed, so why bother?” I’m saying: “Look at what’s happening. Stop looking away. We can still change what happens next.” That isn’t doom. That’s the reason to act. Calling the mirror a “doomer” doesn’t change what’s reflected in it.

Let’s say that SARS-CoV-2 caused some degree of cognitive dysfunction in everyone infected…and each infection made things a little worse. Now suppose infections produced cumulative injury preferentially in periventricular/deep white matter and the small-vessel territories surrounding the ventricles. What functions would be most affected? People might still know things. Expertise, accumulated semantic knowledge, verbal fluency, and crystallized intelligence could remain remarkably well preserved. The impairment could instead lie in using that knowledge efficiently under complexity…processing information quickly, sustaining and dividing attention, inhibiting competing responses, switching between mental sets, holding multiple considerations in mind, and flexibly updating conclusions. That matters because this kind of dysfunction may not announce itself as dramatic memory loss or obvious global cognitive impairment. The population-level signal might instead emerge in reaction-time distributions, processing speed, interference control, set shifting, sustained/divided attention, working memory, and demanding multitask paradigms…domains particularly vulnerable in vascular white-matter disease. Damage enough strategic white-matter connections and you don’t necessarily destroy the cortical regions containing someone’s knowledge. Nope. You degrade the communication architecture connecting otherwise functional regions. That’s why “disconnection” is such a useful model. The nodes can remain remarkably capable while communication among them becomes progressively less efficient. So… What would a society look like if expertise remained visible, but the cognitive machinery required to deploy it flexibly under complexity was gradually deteriorating? Here’s where I stop describing the thought experiment. Because I think about this constantly now. I watch people struggle to sustain attention for five minutes. Ask someone to incorporate something genuinely new into a workflow they’ve performed for years. Ask people to hold several competing explanations in mind simultaneously. Ask them to entertain a hypothetical without immediately collapsing it into what they already believe. Watch what happens. None of those observations proves SARS-CoV-2 caused what you’re seeing. Of course it doesn’t. But the part I find difficult to shake.. If population-level executive function and processing speed really were slowly deteriorating, what exactly do we imagine it would look like? Because I don’t think it would look like everyone suddenly forgetting their names. I think it might look disturbingly ordinary.

I’m going to retweet everyone who posts about this story. Even the Detroit Lions are using this tech. Where r u at @Eagles ? Getting left behind. Adding players to the sick & injured list. Where r u at healthcare? Public schools? Bueller? Bueller!!