Whilst Scotland's Covid restrictions are coming to an end on March 21 - including the legal need to wear a mask - that doesn't mean the virus has vanished.
At present around one in 19 people are said to be infected according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and now new Covid research has suggested that being infected can alter the human brain.
The three main symptoms of covid are a new and continuous cough, a fever as well as a loss or change to your taste or smell.
And the new study says that these symptoms can affect the "thickness and tissue-contrast in the orbitofrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus" - the regions associated with smell and memory, as reported by the Daily Record.
Researchers investigated the changes in the brains of 785 UK Biobank participants aged between 51 and 81 who had, on average, two brain scans 38 months apart and cognitive tests.
The UK Biobank is a large database that includes genetic and health information on half-a-million people living in the UK.
The study said that a total of 401 participants tested positive for Covid in-between their two scans whilst 15 of these people were admitted to hospital.
After looking at the brain scan, patients testing positive were said to display evidence of tissue damage in regions associated with the olfactory cortex, an area linked to smell, and an average reduction in whole brain sizes.
On average, the participants who were infected with the virus also showed greater cognitive decline between their two scans, associated with the atrophy of a brain region known as the cerebellum, which is linked to cognition.
The research, titled Sars-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank, is carried out by Gwenaelle Douaud from the University of Oxford and others and appears in the Nature journal.
Dr Max Taquet, NIHR Oxford Health BRC senior research fellow, University of Oxford, said: "This is the first large-scale study to investigate the actual changes in the brain that can occur after a Covid infection.
"It is well established that Covid infection is associated with subsequent risks of neurological and psychiatric problems in some people including brain fog, loss of taste and smell, depression, and psychosis.
"But why this occurs remains largely unknown. This study starts to shed light on this important question by showing that brain regions connected to the 'smell centre' of the brain can shrink after Covid in some people.
"These brain changes were not observed in every patients and they were mostly subtle.
"These findings might help explain why some people experience brain symptoms long after the acute infection.
"The causes of these brain changes, whether they can be prevented or even reverted, as well as whether similar changes are observed in hospitalised patients, in children and younger adults, and in minority ethnic groups, remain to be determined."
