Throughout much of 2022 something like this happened to me. Calling it a "fog" would have been a complete misnomer, it was more like a complete blackout - I was

Throughout much of 2022 something like this happened to me. Calling it a "fog" would have been a complete misnomer, it was more like a complete blackout - I was unable at one point to keep as little as 3 digits in my head for more than a few seconds, it became a real problem while trying to enter MFA prompts, to the point where I'd give up and start sobbing. I forgot my own address at one point, which prompted me to go to a neurologist who tested for everything under the sun including dementia. Nothing came up. Turned out it was the pandemic - sorta. I had been completely isolated for a while due to the pandemic and remote work, had severe physical pain due to some pending surgery I couldn't get treated (also indirectly due to covid), and some deep personal loss (also covid). As soon as that stuff cleared up and got better, my memory returned promptly. Maybe it was a little covid going on, but I think these studies discount the secondary and tertiary effects of the pandemic a little too quickly. Lots of these symptoms are self-reported too, which is really really prone to error. They need to start putting these people in double-blind studies that test cognition over long periods of time to really get to the root of this.