Brain Fusion and Long Covid

 I can't find a way to embed this, but a three minute video seen at this link is making the rounds. It's an interview with Professor Yazi Ke of MacQuarie University, in Sydney, Australia, explaining Long Covid at the neurological level. She says,

"What happens is when this virus infects our brains, the brain cells start fusing together into these giant multicellular structures. With that it causes a lot of brain functions to not happen. With that it's what we see with Long Covid symptoms. . . . The virus in different individuals can affect different parts of the brain . . . wreaking havoc in these brain areas. . . . There are a lot of viruses that cause neurological symptoms, things like HIV, rabies, Japanese encephalitis . . . If I were to think about it now, knowing what I know, I would say that it's quite permanent. Over time, I can imagine that these large structures of cells actually eventually might die because they don't get to do what they're supposed to do." 

They figured this out by creating mini brains from stem cells, then infecting them to watch what the cells do, which is much better than actually infecting people. In this image of neurons (from here), the pink show typical neural activity, making pathways of communication, and the yellow shows a mass of fused neurons, no longer able to communicate with other cells. Here's the study.

There's no way to unfuse the damaged cells. We need to lower viral loads or avoid the virus entirely to avoid this effect of the virus. This is what brain damage looks like. 

And here's a great 13 minute video explaining Long Covid with simple metaphors to help understanding: