Kelly ServickScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.Since she fell ill with COVID-19 around Thanksgiving, Pamela Furr has been waiting for her old self to return.
A radio news anchor in Tennessee for more than 10 years, she now sometimes finds herself stuck midsentence grasping for simple words; she is prone to forget events and conversations if she doesn’t write them down. “I’m not the same person that I was before COVID,” she says. “I kind of miss me.”The true prevalence of cognitive problems in COVID-19 survivors is elusive, and the underlying causes of lingering symptoms are the subject of ongoing studies.