Eight months after contracting covid-19, the 73-year-old woman can't remember what her husband told her hours earlier. She will forget to remove the laundry from the dryer at the end of the cycle. She would turn on the sink faucet and walk away.

Before covid the woman had been doing bookkeeping for a local business. Now, she can't add single digits to her mind. Is this the earliest stage of dementia, revealed by covid? No. When the therapist assessed the woman's cognition, her scores were normal.

What happened?

Like many people who contract the coronavirus, the woman struggled to maintain focus, organize events and multitask. She complained of post covid fog. She doesn't feel like herself. She has been providing cognitive rehabilitation services to patients, and her condition is improving.

Cognitive rehabilitation is treatment for people whose brain has been damaged by a concussion, traumatic accident, stroke, or neurodegenerative disease. It is a set of interventions designed to help people recover from brain injury, where possible, and adapt to persistent cognitive impairment. Services are usually provided by speech and occupational therapists, neuropsychologists and neurorehabilitation specialists.

In a recent development, some medical centers are offering cognitive rehabilitation to patients with post covid brain fog (symptoms that persist for months or more after infection and cannot be explained by other medical conditions). About a quarter of older adults who have survived COVID-19 have at least one persistent symptom, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts are enthusiastic about the potential for cognitive rehabilitation. What's interesting is that we're seeing a lot of long-term COVID patients make remarkable progress with the right interventions, as defined by the World Health Organization, Post-COVID Conditions or Long COVID, also known as Post-COVID-19 syndrome.

It means that after the patient is infected with the new coronavirus, the PCR result is positive as the standard, and he still has symptoms 3 months later. More detailed updated statistics on post covid brain symptoms incidence according to the timeline can be found in the graph below.