I had a mild case of covid and the loss of smell and taste was unlike anything similar I've ever experienced. It's not like having a stuffed nose or just being less sensitive to smell. For me I could breathe just fine but could not smell or taste anything, literally zero. Even very strong smelling things did nothing for me, and food had zero taste. It's a very unusual experience and I think a dead giveaway that you had the virus (it appears near the end of an infection typically).
My girlfriend had that symptoms for few days, so I've told her to make the test, she got back and told me that the test was positive and we've got 2 weeks quarantine, it was august 26th.
The very next day I got really painful arthralgia (august 27th). The next day was fever that lasted till the thursday (august 29th). On the next day (30th august) I was feeling good, though that that was the end. Oh boy how I was wrong. Later on the same day I've had issues with breathing, friday night was nightmare with short shallow breathing and fever, that scared me a lot, never feel that way. I've gad few times pneumonia when I was a kid, but this was next level. The next day was better, so I didn't call an ambulance as they were already overwhelmed, but got to the hospital by myself and did the test with positive result. On the monday (september 2nd) I started coughing a lot, but the next day was much worse. With tuesday I started having headaches, dizziness and ear ache.. Coughing, headaches and dizziness lasted more than a week, with better and worse days.
It was the worst experience of the last few years, and it started with loss of smell an taste.
lucky I don't experience respiratory problems but I got a false recovery like you, this last Tuesday. Before I had some fever and headaches for four days.
I had some fever this two last days. and I'm experiencing weird tastes with a few good ingredients. Today, I don't had fever but nearly all day I feel a lot of sluggishnes.
False recovery is the worst thing, when you think that this is the end, then sluggishnes and headaches comes to remind you that you are still sick. Headaches and sluggishnes with dizziness still keep coming back, like last monday it was bad to the point I though that I'll lie down on the floor and won't get up. From what I've found, every time when I feel sick, my blood pressure is above 140/90. Check yours It may be the case.
I'm doing much better now, thanks! Yeah I was a bit skeptical about covid, thought it was exaggerated, but when you go trough all of this by yourself, then you realize that it wasn't.
30ish, one condition that I can think of is sinusitis, which I always have when I have the flu, with swelling of the eyes and stuffed nose. But this time there was no swelling nor stuffed nose.
also my brother when he was a kid, had pneumonia few times as I did, and when he's sick (mostly flu) he has the same issues that I've got.
My wife was ill earlier during the first wave. She literally gargled TCP (the chemical, not the protocol. Handshakes are illegal.) and couldn't taste it. If you've ever been around this chemical you know how strong it smells, people can smell it across the house. That's when we suspected Covid. Couldn't get a test until months later, and it was negative. But still suspect it.
Why would you gargle TCP?
[edit: this was a confusion between an antiseptic whose name is TCP, and a chemical which is acronymmed as TCP. The former is mostly phenol (which I wouldn't recommend drinking, but apparently has been approved for that), the latter is a dangerous industrial solvent which you should not drink.
Based on the context, I now think the person was gargling the antiseptic called TCP, which is really phenol (a totally different chemical from TCP). So I think I understand the confusion now.
When using TLAs for chemicals, it's often better to write out the full chemical name instead. When I say "IPA" I mean isopropyl alcohol but everything thinks I mean beer.
It's just one of those things where the different context between countries doesn't translate well.
In the UK, if you say "TCP" everybody knows that you're talking about the antiseptic phenolic liquid that can be used for gargling but never swallowed. It's present in most househould medicine cabinets.
It's important to note here, given that the subject is loss of the sense of taste and smell, that this stuff absolutely reeks.
> When I say "IPA" I mean isopropyl alcohol but everything thinks I mean beer.
Somewhere around April/May, everyone in my circles and all their dogs were suddenly talking about "IPA". I was very, very confused until I eventually figured out they didn't mean the beer.
TCP (the antiseptic) is more of a brand name. It was named after a chemical but doesn't contain that chemical at all anymore; "TCP" in this context is just referring to the brand name. If you gargle TCP you're gargling whatever whatever mixture of phenols they put in it now, not trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl.
"TCP is recognized in California as a human carcinogen, and extensive animal studies have shown that it causes cancer. Short term exposure to TCP can cause throat and eye irritation and can affect muscle coordination and concentration. Long term exposure can affect body weight and kidney function."
Doesn't sound like something one should gargle tho.
You don't want to drink this,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,2,3-Trichloropropane
and the data supporting it is far better than coffee. (the california law is stupid, but some of the things it lists actually are dangerous).
It's a traditional antiseptic introduced in the UK in the 1920s. It has a strong, somewhat medicinal, smell. I gargled it once, and regretted it because it tastes foul.
It is effective against gingivitis and mouth ulcers and will also ward off vampires and werewolves. Actually smells better than garlic and is cheaper than silver, so win win.
It really isn't that bad to gargle but not particularly pleasant either. It is effective though and that's the real point.
There are carcinogens and there are CARCINOGENS. Hot water is technically a carcinogen. Drinking water that is too hot can increase the risk of throat cancer. This doesn't mean we can't use them. We just have to be aware of the risks.
No, not if the "risks" is comically small. The warning label becomes meaningless when applied to anything with an astronomically low chance of causing cancer.
The list of things California says doesn't cause cancer is much smaller than its list of recognized human carcinogens. And animals studies are not 1:1 to humans.
It's literally a medical antiseptic designed to be gargled after dilution.
I would not put too much stock in Prop 65 warnings. Any restaurant with grilled or fried food is required to have them. Eyeglasses are known to cause cancer in CA. Until recently, so was coffee (buy after a long legal battle, coffee is no longer known to cause cancer here)
Same thing here. Very mild case. I had a .5 degree fever for a day (normally I'm 97.5 in the morning and 98.4 in the evening). I coughed like three times. But the sense of smell was completely removed for 4ish days. I have some eucalyptus/tea tree/menthol shampoo that smells _very very_ strongly. When I couldn't smell that anymore it was the craziest sensation. No other symptoms to really speak of. This also appeared later.
A test months later would be negative (if it was a swab) they are only accurate in the first week or so.
The antibody tests are fraught with issues, and if you fight the virus with your T cells rather than B cells, the antibody test won't pick that up and you'll show as negative.
i saw this and, echoing many of the other commenters, thought it was a _different_ TCP chemical, in this case, a relatively obscure drug similar to PCP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenocyclidine
I’m glad that was picked out. So subtle yet actually maybe exclaim out loud in this hotel lobby. I have a mask on and there are very few here so hopefully I haven’t endangered anyone, but something so sublime deserves an applause.
Same taste outcome here. Coffee and Coke Zero became very disappointing. I was swabbed and confirmed diagnosed with it.
It really did me in and I’m not sure I completely recovered form it yet. Took me 3 months after it was over to be able to run more than 30 seconds again. I could do a 5km run easily before. It’s a struggle now. But I’m in my 40’s so I expected a longer recovery cycle.
Did it change at some point? Back when I drank soft drinks I had become a diet soft drink consumer and Coke Zero was a godsend as being at least somewhat like actual Coke.
All I know is that when it came out 15 years ago it was awesome, and at some point probably 5 years ago I realised it tasted like crap and switched to pepsi max.
Nowadays when I do happen to drink some it tastes extremely terrible to me.
Edit: Apparently Coke Zero is no longer sold anywhere except where I live (New Zealand), so I guess nobody else in this forum will be able to check for themselves.
The rest of the world switched to "Coke Zero Sugar" and no longer has Coke Zero. In NZ the new product is called Coke No Sugar and Coke Zero continues to be sold because it was really popular I guess.
I've noticed that Coke Zero bottles that were left out in the sun lose most of their sweetness and taste awful. Maybe there's some photosensitive compound in the sweetener.
I found the same about Diet Coke (Coke Light in some countries). Something changed about 10-12 years ago and it started tasting "chemically" and harsh and I no longer liked it. I switched to Diet Dr. Pepper which I find has a smoother taste. But with the aluminum can shortage, it's become hard to buy in stores.
I had that exact experience for 12 days after a fever and a light cough in March. I couldn't even smell Thai fish sauce.
They wouldn't test me because it wasn't on their list of symptoms in Germany, even though South Korea, UK and China were already reporting it as a strong indicator for Corona.
I had some symptoms in mid-March as well, and actually on my birthday noticed I couldn't smell or taste nearly as well as normal. It was very apparent because I work as a barista, so naturally I rely on my sense of smell quite a lot, and I had really enjoyed the same green tea the day before and the day of my smell loss; it just tasted incredibly flat. My birthday meal and birthday wine were just a waste on me. My wife and I were tested for antibodies about 6 weeks later, when our son was born, and neither of us was found to have antibodies. It wasn't until around the first week of April that I first heard loss of your sense of smell was a symptom of COVID19. In spite of the antibody test, I suspect I had the virus. About how quickly does the antibody count drop if you develop specific antibodies to COVID19? I read somewhere that some people recovered from their infections without developing antibodies tailored to COVID19 and it was thought that these individuals overcame the virus due to their body's already existing store of antibodies for other types of Corona virus. I can't remember where I read that article now.
There is a huge variance in antibody response and duration between patients. It seems to correlate with symptom severity but there are other factors still not understood (possibly genetic). In some cases the innate immune system fights off the infection before antibodies are generated. In other cases the antibodies fade away quickly, but a high level of immunity is retained through memory T cells. Unfortunately there's no quick or easy way to do a specific T cell assay.
There is a hypothesis that prior exposure to other similar viruses provides a limited degree of immunity from SARS-CoV-2. It's plausible and fits some of the case patterns but we don't know yet if it's a significant effect.
Same thing happened to me -- and I also tested negative for antibodies about five weeks later. My partner (who had more of a flu-like illness) did test positive for antibodies though, so I'm very certain I had it. My hypotheses are: test was not specific enough, i fought it off quickly with t-cell immunity, or my antibodies fell off very quickly since I really was not sick (I had fever of 100 for about three hours and some burning pain in my nasal cavity and that's it)
I really wish they would get in gear and start rolling out widespread serologic testing. Many people have similar stories to you. For a lot of people symptoms were before there was any testing available.
With widespread serologic testing, we can at least get some waypoint data, and for people like you some peace of mind.
I'm not a doctor or biologist, but afaik your body has multiple possible responses to a viral infection, and not all of them end with an immunity. The second thing that a virus may mutate more or less quickly, evading your previous immunity.
There was concern initially, and still somewhat, that it might not confer long-term immunity. Not everything does, even if your body fights something off in the short term.
This novel coronavirus is different enough from others, and the human body's response to it is very unusual, so it's reasonable to ask whether infection confers immunity.
People were quick to assume immunity at first, because that's what people want to be true. But it was recognised as a dangerous assumption, which has a realistic prospect of being wrong.
Some people end up with antibody levels too low to measure after infection, which adds more weight to the idea that they might not be immune afterwards. You could think of that as a level of evidence; certainly it comes under "we should take this seriously". (Fortunately the human body has other mechanisms for long-term immunity (T-cell memory), but that still needs to be studied.)
The difference between assumption and evidence on this is important because it strongly informs our models of its propagation, how many people will get it how fast, how best to contain and limit it, and whether people who have had can safely (for themselves and others) behave differently afterwards.
If you've had Covid-19 and you're still struggling with Long Covid 3-6 months later, you're going to want to know if there's a realistic chance you could catch it a second time, especially because by then you know you are one of those susceptible to awful symptoms. It's not enough to assume it's just like other coronaviruses - you will have personal experience that it isn't.
I believe _jstreet is referring to the case of getting sick again if exposed to the coronavirus a second time. There are limited data, but so far it looks like the re-infection is less severe.
I have something like that right now (started exactly week ago), I can't smell or taste and I can easily breath through the nose, but I also feel some pressure, like it would be a little bit swollen inside. It's cold outside and breating through the nose is mildly painful when I go out. Looks more like sinus infection without typical symptoms. I wonder if you felt it like that or the loss of smell was the only indicator of illness.
-If the person gets sicker later, you don't have to wait on another test to know the diagnosis and start treatment.
-Second is from a contact tracing perspective and isolation perspective. If this person is positive, it is that much more important that they limit contact with people.
-Third is if you are positive you can donate your plasma which *may help others (good randomized controlled trials for convalescent plasma are still pending).
-If you are positive you make not need the vaccine later, it also could reduce your risk potentially for being infected later, less stress.
-Also helps population wide to know total number of infected to get an idea of rate of spread, herd immunity, other metrics.
I was sick with something like that at the end of nov 2019 - end of dec 2019. normally cold air is relaxing to my lungs, but then cold air stung. no loss of taste though, does the pain feel like stinging or something else?
And it feels like sinus infection, but on the other hand I can't imagine why I can't smell and taste stuff if I can easily breath. I'm taking already meds for sinus infection, will call my doctor after the weekend if there will be no improvement. Unfortunately in Poland we can't get covid test without having all four symptoms of it... I could do this myself, but it's very pricey and I'm doing my work from home and wearing a mask in shops anyway, so I'll just isolate even more.
This is why I think all the case count numbers are basically garbage.
For most people, going to the doctor is more bother than it's worth and half the time they'll tell you that you don't qualify for whatever test or treatment you were hoping to receive anyway.
There is a massive disconnect between how many people are testing positive and how many people are actually infected, and it's skewing everyone's perception of the virus.
This seems to have huge geographic variation. Some places you've got to go to the doc & get a referral & they're screening people out of getting the test. Other places, they're having drive-through or walk-up testing for anyone, no questions asked. Of course you'll get different results in these cases.
That would certainly help to stop the spread of Covid, but if everyone followed your advice, we would very quickly find ourselves with an entirely new set of problems.
You can't optimize only to stop viral spread. You have to strike some balance between maintaining normalcy and reducing the risk of spread.
Covid has killed a million, and will surely kill many more, but global poverty is going to increase this year for the first time in decades, and tens of millions are going go hungry.
> That would certainly help to stop the spread of Covid, but if everyone followed your advice, we would very quickly find ourselves with an entirely new set of problems.
The advice of not going to a store if you're sick with something that resembles Covid? Is that such a large number of people it will have a big cost?
The tricky part there is "resembles Covid". The symptoms are so variable from person to person (I've heard it likened to the flu, a bad cold, a mild cold, a sinus infection - all this from different people that tested positive) that nailing those down with any certainty enough to make hard decisions like that on, is basically impossible.
From what people who experienced it told me, it's not the smell & taste loss which come from colds and similar illnesses, where your nose is runny or obstructed.
One person told me she was cleaning something with vinegar, her daughter entered the kitchen and told her "mum, this vinegar smell is horrible!" and then it dawned on her she couldn't smell anything.
No runny or stuffy nose. She was normal, except she couldn't smell anything.
At this point of the pandemic, complete loss of smell and taste of this kind almost certainly indicates covid19, outliers notwithstanding.
Trust me, I know the difference between being unable to smell/taste because your nose is blocked, and actual anosmia where you can breathe normally but the sense is just gone.
I don't know if most people experience anosmia like you describe while having a common cold or the flu, though (I think they don't). From what I've read this symptom is a pretty reliable indicator of covid19, so much so that at this time it pretty much rules out any other diagnosis and it is a strong basis for medical decision making. (Of course, there will always be outliers for any symptom. Decisions still need to be made at the population scale, though).
I can manage to buy myself a three-course dinner with wine and dessert (spending a pretty $$) without going into a shop. I've managed to buy hundreds of dollars worth of books from my local bookstores without going into shops. I can lie on my floor gasping for air and get power tools delivered to my porch!
Let's be clear about what we want. It sounds like you want people to spend money, not primarily that you want them to enter shops and breathe air and touch things.
> (it appears near the end of an infection typically)
Hmm doesn't that contradict the article? Of it is at the end of the infection, then it feels like it isn't good as a warning to others that you got the virus, and more of an indicator that you had the virus
For me it was at the end of very mild flu-like symptoms (general malaise, sleeping a lot etc.). It's possible I was still contagious when I lost my smell and taste so people should probably self-isolate if they experience the same. Though my guess from personal experience is that this is a lagging indicator and possibly anyone with this has already been infectious for a while.
This was actually the UK government's justification for not including it on the list of symptoms that they asked people to self-isolate for initially - even though it was fairly specific to Covid, they reckoned it appeared too late in order to be all that useful as a criteria to get people to self-isolate. Notice also that the article doesn't say anything about when the symptom appears.
Same happened to me. No cold, runny nose, or any problems with airways. But my smell was just gone. I literally ground up basil and garlic and stuck it up my nose... nothing.
Back around 2010 I had this happen to me, It was so bizarre. Someone told me it was do to a sinus infection but I never had to go on antibiotics for one and no pain. I was sick that year with other things not related to the nose and it took a long time to get my sense of smell back. It never fully recovered to what it was. One thing I remember is it was like a filter and some things smelled awful and some things like nothing at all. Onions smelled like ammonia is what I remember most. I had lots of test done and never found out why. It wasn't a pleasant experience and freaked me out a little.
In February of 2019 I flew to SF for a business trip, and a few days after my return my wife became sick with an unknown illness -- she was complaining of shortness of breath, had a cough, lightheaded feeling and migraines.
Her breathing continued to get worse over a period of days to the point where she was waking up with blue lips and would become totally winded when walking a few feet.
Eventually she decided she needed to see a dr so we went to an urgent care -- due to the fact we had no car (we were living downtown Denver at the time) we walked and only a few blocks from the house she nearly collapsed -- I had to hold her up while we walked very slowly the rest of the way to the urgent care -- once we arrived she was immediately put on oxygen and given an IV.
later that night she was sent home, but in the morning her condition was worse, so we went to the ER but she was sent home again this time with asthma medication including an emergency inhaler.
Her breathing was labored for months and she continued to use the emergency inhaler during this time.
In August of 2019 she completely lost her sense of taste and smell.
In October 2019 she got exponentially worse so we went back to the ER and this time they checked her in.
They ran loads of tests on her, checked for cancer, HIV etc. -- eventually they gave her a bronchoscopy and found lots of very thick stringy mucus all in her lungs and found that she had a collapsed lung.
During this time they treated her with oxygen and antibiotics.
All of the tests they ran came back negative -- she remained in the hospital for a week and eventually recovered. I was in close contact with her during this time I even laid next to her in the hospital bed but did not contract her illness.
After 7 days the doctors concluded that she must have developed asthma and sent her home with an inhaler which she relied on daily until around February.
She is now able to exercise on a treadmill without ill effects. However if I cook things on the stove and it produces smoke this seems to trigger mild issues, and occasionally she has a stuffy nose that seems like allergies.
I'm not saying she had covid-19 but she had many of the symptoms. She had no fever during this time.
Did that include tongue-based tastes, too, like sweet / salty / sour / bitter / umami, or just olfactory ones? Like, if you ate an orange would it be sweet and sour at all?
I had experienced loss both of smell (completely, kitty litter smelled like nothing) and taste (not completely). You still sense if something's salty, for example, but it's very remote. As an anecdote, the aubergine paste, which is usually off-putting and bitter to my taste (but smells nice) started tasting like nothing, really, so I happily ate my wife's supply. Soy sauce also seemed far less salty than usual. Taste remains, but very far, and smell is just lost. Very bizarre experience, would not recommend.
For me yes. Couldn’t taste anything for about a week so I just ate soup and toast. After that the sweet , salt ,fatty etc came back so I swapped to lasagna and cannelloni as it was the most normal tasting food.
Couldn’t even smell the alcohol in a bottle of whiskey.
Very weird how much smell/taste means to us but how do you don’t notice it going.
In our house no one noticed their sense of smell going yet it was a massive impact to me when I was eating flavourless food for two weeks. It was incredibly depressing not being able to go outside and being stuck in eating gruel.
The only reason we got tested was because someone wanted a sick note from the doctor and she asking everyone what they’re sense of smell was like.
Just to be pedantic: You can never smell the alcohol (ethanol) in any alcoholic drink. It's a tasteless and odourless chemical. What you taste or smell are the congeners, which are other organic molecules that are the byproducts of fermentation. In the case of whisky, you also have the additional flavour and odour chemicals leached from wood barrels.
You're basically smelling "charred wood extract" when smelling Whiskey.
You're almost certainly smelling the denaturing agent in the alcohol, the vast majority of commercial sources add something to it, even for "technical" grades.
I kept a bottle of Caol Ila by my desk and sniffed it every few hours so I could detect when my smell start coming back. I accidentally did it on a few work calls...
It's too late to edit the above comment to clarify it, but could the downvoters please explain why I was downvoted? I'm genuinely curious: what does "loss of taste" mean here? I'd like to know in case I encounter it.
For instance, if I have sinus congestion so that I can't breathe through my nose, I can't experience the olfactory component of tastes. If you gave me orange juice and lemon juice, I'd be able to tell that both were sweet and sour but might not be able to distinguish between the flavors.
So when I've read about losing taste, I've wondered if this was like all the prior times when I've lost the sense of smell, or if this was something new and my taste buds would also stop working so that I couldn't experience "salty" anymore.
When people discuss taste, it's not always clear whether they mean the sensation you experience in your tongue or in your nose.
Good question, I'm also interested. In my case (more covid-like symptoms than anything else, but no confirmation) I can feel difference between lemon and banana. But the sourness doesn't bother me at all. Also onion doesn't work anymore, normally I would cry like crazy, now I can keep it under my nose and feel only a little bit of pain inside the nose.
I've suffered reduced smell and taste from colds, though I've never entirely lost either. Even with the worst colds I could still clearly identify the acrid smell of smoke from idling diesels from 50 yards away at work.
> I had a mild case of covid and the loss of smell and taste was unlike anything similar I've ever experienced.
Very much true. Usually when you bite a lemon you feel a strong sour taste followed by involuntary movement of hands tightening towards the chest and shivering briefly.
With covid's loss of taste, i felt no taste at all when biting a lemon, but the body wants to shiver which i could control easily but was very confusing experience i never felt before. Very unique experience.
Also realized the appetite falls rapidly. Without taste i had to force feed myself. During normal illness your are tired and don't want to eat, but this is very different experience.
That was how I knew. Had a vague sense of coming down with something; smelled a scented candle which I KNEW i could smell (normally), didn’t sense it at all. Test followed.
Strange that this was known early, yet never was considered an indicator easily tested.
Thank you for posting this. I've never been able to tell what "loss" meant in media reports. I've had instances where I don't have much of a sense of smell, but I can still smell certain strong odors.
This was my exact presentation of the virus. A deeply profound loss of smell and taste, with an otherwise clear nose. I did develop some significant fatigue and fogginess and a slight cough, but the complete loss of smell and taste was upsetting. The early articles about this connection back in March is what prompted us to get tested. In our cases, though, this symptom appeared almost immediately and stuck with us throughout the infection, so I don't think it's fair to generalize about when anosmia is likely within the course of the virus.
When this happened to me I recovered my senses within about two weeks, but coffee smelt like a combo of burning plastic and rotting flesh for several weeks after. To this day (six months later), certain things smell different than they did before: low tide, poop, some foods when heated. [edit: and they all smell like the same thing]
My wife lost her sense of smell and taste, likely from COVID, back in March and has not yet recovered it. She has recovered "impressions" -- things smell or taste bad or good, but can't distinguish an actual identifiable odor.
I had an almost complete loss of smell, unlike anything I've experienced before, but could still smell some aerosols like air freshener. My sense of smell was back to normal in about 3 days.
I currently have this symptom. I ordered extremely spicy Thai food last week. I could feel the heat, but not taste anything at all.
After about 4 days, I regained some ability to differentiate between salty/sour/sweet, but it’s been in and out for the last 2-3 days. I accidentally poured too much mustard on a sandwich at lunch today and could not have told you there was any mustard on it at all in a blind test.
I mostly ate spicy food during my time with it due to the fact the physical sensation of spiciness being one of the only things that made food interesting. Same with saltiness. I actually ate a lot less during that period due to not having much drive to do so with a lack of taste.
With a mostly mild case, it took me three weeks approximately, for my full sense of smell to return.
I lost maybe 85% of my sense of smell, and 1/2 the sense of taste. I could no longer smell anything in the air, atmospheric scents. Like if you walk into a restaurant you might be able to smell food broadly in the air; I couldn't smell what was cooking on the stove six feet away. I could only smell something if it was right under my nose (within ~20-30cm). A lot of people seem to totally lose the sense of smell, I didn't reach that level (and it still took most of a month to return).
Same here. What's was funny about losing my sense of smell is that unlike vision or even hearing, it's hard to remember how strong things were supposed to smell before, so it was also hard to know when it was fully back. But at around 1 week I smelled a raw leek and got a whiff of something and then within about 2-3 weeks, it wasn't noticeable anymore.
Absolute same - a vague whiff, tastes coming back to food with varying strengths depending on what it was, then a return to normalcy. I'm still not sure if it's back to 100%, simply due to the fact I also never really had a mindful baseline of what was normal.
I probably had decreased smell, and it felt like I was tasting with the sides of my tongue and cheeks(2 weeks later the middle of my tongue peeled off almost looked like I was getting a snake tongue).
I did test multiple times and I could still smell and taste, though it felt like maaaybe my smell was decreasing, but every article I read said completely gone smell and taste.
I realises my smell was reduced when I was in the hospital and I suddenly could smell how stinky the room and I were, then it hit me "yeah, my smelling was probably bad untill now.
My wife "realised" she lost her smell and taste right after her test came back positive.
But she most likely lied for the attention(I know this sounds harsh, but I have goos reasons to think so).
Same here, although I also had a cough and fever. My wife is a doctor and got infected at work, she suffered only a mild illness with mild fever on day one and then a cough for the rest of the week. After 7 days she went back to work (according with gov guidelines) and was never unwell again. When she was self isolating at home I looked after her and must have been exposed to huge viral loads as I was obviously in very close contact and didn’t change my behaviour at all. I was just there as if she had a normal flu or cold, so warm hugging her at night, still giving her kisses and going normally about life. 5 days into her isolation I got a fever as well and I had a very high fever for the first two days. Then it disappeared like it normally would and I just had a cough left for the week and felt a bit tired obviously. After roughly 10 days I felt like I was all good again and even started to go for runs in the park again and to work out at home again. Weirdly we lost our sense of taste and smell entirely towards the end of the first 7 days and it lasted for about 5 days in total despite all other symptoms having disappeared. It was a complete loss, like nothing I had ever had before. All in all the loss of smell and taste was literally the most annoying about it, otherwise it felt like an extremely mild flu like not even worth talking about. Luckily smell and taste came fully back, just suddenly one day it was back and that was the end of story. This happened in early April in the UK. Since then we felt great, no lasting symptoms whatsoever. I’m not a super athlete or anything, but I do enjoy sports and I have maintained a great condition and actually even feel a lot stronger than before. Probably because due to the extra work outs I get from all the extra time. This virus is just a regular respiratory illness and it’s honestly so mild I cannot believe how the world is going bonkers over this. I actually hope that the more people get it hopefully they will realise like me that this whole reaction to COVID is massively over the top. There will always be some people with complications and some who die. But that is literally just like with other viruses which we don’t care about. If you’re in normal health, are not fat and not end of life, then there’s nothing to worry about.
Of course I can, I just did make a conclusion because of my own experience and the experience of dozens of other people who I know IRL. Many staff at my wife’s work got infected. 0 deaths of those and 0 “long covids”.
I’m just saying that like with the flu, everyone around me who had COVID finds it laughable because it was actually milder than the flu. Feels to me like the people who get critically ill must be some really badly unhealthy people with some bad existing health issues. I’m not hand waving it, I’m just not very surprised and not freaking out when someone tells me that extremely unhealthy people have health issues. I mean that’s kind of what unhealthy means at the end of the day, when your body is much weaker than the average person and vulnerable to benign viruses.
We had someone die in our family presumably from COVID, but that person was 94 and we were told that she probably won’t make this year already in November 2019, which was before COVID. It’s a perfect example where she ends up in the COVID statistic, but she didn’t die from COVID. She died because she was 94 and her body gave up no matter what she would’ve had.
My family got Covid in March. I had very mild symptoms, easily confused with springtime allergies. My wife ended up with pneumonia and was almost hospitalized. One child got bronchitis. Another had mild symptoms.
I didn't notice it much at the time, but my sense of smell had changed. It's now October as I write this and I haven't recovered. In fact I would say it has gotten worse.
I'm trying to think of how to describe it, because it's not as simple as saying I can't smell things. There are things that I used to be able to smell with a lot of nuance in flavor, like ripe fruits, wines, cheese varieties, and so on. Now, the nuance is gone. The hint of the smell is there, and for things that I used to eat often, I still have the memory of the smell and taste. Because I'm unable to smell other things, it makes me wonder if I am actually smelling things, or if my mind is telling me that the thing I am eating has a familiar taste, like a phantom smell sensation.
Because of this, I now have a strong preference for very spicy foods and other strong flavors, because it's the only time I ever really taste something.
I am also in the camp of people who have lost the ability to smell certain things, even toxic things. I can't smell cleaning products that contain chlorine-based bleach, for example. I don't notice certain other funky smells that I would normally find repulsive. When the city was blanketed in smoke here in Seattle for a week, I barely noticed the smell. It was there, but only faintly.
The strange part to me is that some smells have fundamentally changed. When I am outside and working in our garden, the smell of soil is now profound. Wet, woody material has a very strong scent. It got me wondering if there was some evolutionary advantage the virus was selecting for, like it was giving me the smelling abilities of some woodland creature. I know that's stupid. That's just where my Covid brain has gone.
The observer in me wants to run experiments to try to document the experience. The pragmatist would prefer to drink a stout beer and eat a BBQ burger with Gorgonzola cheese and pickled jalapeños.
That's crazy, I'm so sorry you haven't regained your senses the way they were.
My friend is experiencing exactly the same results many months after having Covid. Doctor prescribed steroids for him which made it better for a brief period of time but then it regressed.
I, on the other hand, lost my smell for about 4 weeks after which it mostly came back to normal.
I just don't understand why no one is talking about this, as it seems like quite a lot of people have had permanent changes to their smell and this is just absolutely terrifying.
My father lost his sense of taste from eating poison ivy as a dare as a child (his older brothers basically tricked him into it). Similarly, he LOVED spicy and extremely salty foods because those were the only things he could taste. I grew up loving over-salted food because that was the way my family cooked.
I personally know multiple people that got COVID-19 earlier this year (March/April) with mild symptoms, however their smell/taste is STILL impaired today. One told me he believes his olfactory senses are about 70% recovered, 5 months later. He's lost weight from losing the desire to eat, which is terrifying. Hopefully it's just a matter of time and they recover fully - there's a lot about the virus we still don't fully understand, and there is a chance of permanent effects even with mild symptoms.
Worth noting, this research is n=590. It is disappointing to see 10 months into this there’s still research conducted that's super local (likely a single strain) and low N count.
I would expect we have diagnosis and symptom data for at least hundreds of thousands of cases just in the US at this point?
Oh really, imagine the counter-factual universe where we do. Where does the data come? You log on to HN and hear about how they determined that diabetes is associated with diet soda by linking your store purchases with medical records. Construct a hypothetical comment. What does it look like?
Imagine the front-page of the NYT in that counter-factual world. Imagine the outrage on Twitter. Now, choose to inhabit that counter-factual world by starting the company that does this. Good luck.
There’s an impressive big data symptom analysis going on in the UK through the Covid Symptom Tracker app create by a company called Zoe. They’ve been doing trials comparing reported symptoms with PCR testing.
There were many papers that came out over 4 months ago with more people and other approaches, all with similar conclusion [1-3]. Not sure why this paper is getting a lot of press.
Are there restrictions to be enrolled as a participant in these researches? I still do not understand why cannot a large group of people be studied given its disastrous imapct.
I'm just an armchair speculator so my opinion might even be slightly negative value but it appears to me that there just isn't any coordinated leadership at the national level that has tried to implement or expressed interest in implementing that.
One of the difficulties is that the countries that have good, science-led national leadership have concentrated on stopping the spread (just thinking about Finland with its national health system for instance). Countries with chaotic and uncoordinated responses, like the US, are too chaotic and uncoordinated to collect good data for research as well. There are not coordinated, science-led countries that let a lot of people get it for research purposes. Countries like Italy and the UK that got overwhelmed just didn't do this type of systematic research because they were busy. In the US some large insurance systems are doing research, but they're not necessarily incentivized to share their knowledge or data.
I had covid and at least my experience was very different. When I have a cold, I get stuffy and lose my sense of smell a little bit. With covid, it wasn't stuffiness... just couldn't smell, period. This remained after all other symptoms cleared up and I otherwise felt just fine.
While this is all perfectly valid, some appear to be missing the implication of headlines like these as the US enters the fall season. It's a common time for seasonal allergies to present themselves (I'm dealing with them right now), and colds and flu tend to start spreading around this time.
People, being the way they are these days, will see headlines like these whilst having a stuffy nose, then immediately freak out when they realize they can't smell quite as well as normal. They won't take in the nuances of what it's like to lose their taste senses due to COVID versus other causes.
Regardless of how intentional these outcomes are, the media are well aware of the risks and are being rather cruel - not to mention, careless - for engaging in these practices.
That person who freaked out with the stuffy nose is now more at risk of catching COVID by forcing themselves to go to a testing location unnecessarily, thereby increasing their chances of exposure. Not a productive outcome at all.
I am sure you have the evidence to prove that in "drive-up situations," there's no risk of exposure? Because if you don't, I would call your claim the misleading one.
If you are to believe the dubious claims made about this virus, dive-through testing is by no means a guarantee [0] of safety. Remember, this thing spreads like no other respiratory virus spreads - that's why it's supposed to be so scary.
Am I supposed to just accept that you're right because your "source" has their employment tied to the events of this pandemic? Highly specious reasoning.
Disinformation. Some people have a stuffed nose and cant smell as well from that, many people can't smell or taste with the flu without a stuffed nose, way before covid was ever a thing...
I had a genuine case of anosmia after recovering a regular cold. I could breathe clearly through my nose but had absolutely no sense of smell. Couldn’t smell gasoline or anything at all. It lasted for weeks and one day my sense of smell suddenly returned.
In the interest of anecdotal evidence, when I had covid the symptoms were all mild and indicative of a fairly normal cold (one day of a very mild fever + chills + exhaustion, and a few days of general malaise and sinus drainage plus slight cough). I was actually quite surprised when the test I decided to take in the interest of an abundance of caution returned positive, and that afternoon (day 4 of active symptoms) was when my sense of smell & taste completely turned off. It went from "my coffee tastes weak this morning" to "olfactory sensation has 100% vanished" in the course of a few hours. And for anyone who keeps saying you can lose smell/taste from a cold or the flu - in my personal experience, that is due to sinus blockage or drainage. This is a completely different sort of loss. I could breathe completely clearly through my nose and there was still absolutely nothing. Other symptoms were gone within 8-9 days of initial symptoms, but it took a full week for any sense of taste to come back and almost three weeks for it to return to normal.
I lost my sense of smell about a month ago, I didn't have any symptoms. None. None of my family members were sick or got sick - neither did I come into contact with anyone who was sick...
There are 2 theories, either I got the flu and my immune system just took care of it and it went away, leaving me with this condition OR that I was trying to bench 2 plates (45 lb * 4) and did something that might have damaged the olfactory bulb as I did feel a rush of blood enter the middle of my head.
The problem with trying to pinpoint this is that you don't realize it right away, it takes a couple of days to realize that, hey maybe I should have been smelling something now?
I can only smell very intense scents - normal smell is gone... feels really weird as I am only in my mid 20's.
Go to a doctor. I have congenital anosmia, and all the research I've done says that losing your sense of smell is serious. There are some things that may help, but they are more effective the sooner you do them.
If you are in the bay area there is a doctor at Stanford who actively researching in this field:
Do you have any reading on this? Both my brother and I lost much of our sense of smell. Him to a far larger extent than me.
Don’t know why, or when. I just know mine is lesser than that of most people based on how soon they smell things or how near.
My brother saw a specialist. I think after trying a few things they recommended smell training which helped a bit. But they didn’t describe it as especially serious, so I’d be curious to know what you’re referring to.
(I don’t mean in a skeptical way, but rather that I don’t know too much about the condition)
Amosmia can be an early sign of Parkinson’s disease, and people who lose their sense of smell can suffer from depression and weight loss. It can also happen after head trauma.
In thinking about it, noticeable changes in any sense probably warrants a trip to the doctor.
My email is in my profile if you want to talk more.
I had a pretty bad case of Coronavirus, had a high fever for nearly 2 weeks, but I actually never lost my sense of taste or smell! Those around me who contracted a mild case, actually lost smell and taste. Pretty odd stuff.
I'd not be surprised if both severity & symptoms vary a lot by which bodily tissues are 1st infected & bear the brunt of viral replication.
An initial infection via inhaling a large "initial inoculum" (viral dose) into the deep lungs (its favorite cells)? Severe case, but less impact on nasal/smelling membranes.
An initial infection in the outer nose - which is to some extent the body's evolved sample-invaders-and-contain-them zone? Definite temporary impact on smell, but a relative immune-system head-start before viruses reach the lungs, so milder case overall.
(Some health-care workers have shown repeated positive nasal swabs, but remain asymptomatic & seronegative for blood antibodies, suggesting they had a very mild infection fought-off completely in their nose/throat. Some of these have also then generated re-infection reports, but similarly mild. It seems if the body has an easy time confining the infection the 1st time, it also never bothers to create a large standing army of antibodies – but that's exactly the situation where it doesn't need to.)
>Seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in people with an acute loss in their sense of smell and/or taste in a community-based population in London, UK: An observational cohort study
> Conclusion: Our findings suggest that recent loss of smell is a highly specific COVID-19 symptom and should be considered more generally in guiding case isolation, testing, and treatment of COVID-19.
I think this is a situation where having loss of smell is a strong indicator of having COVID, but not having loss of smell doesn't imply testing negative.
Exactly. Losing your sense of smell is a strange and specific enough thing that, in this study, 80% of the people who volunteered because they noticed a loss of smell tested positive for COVID. But that doesn't mean 80% of people with COVID lose their sense of smell - other studies report "that the incidence rate of olfactory dysfunction in COVID-19 patients varies from 33.9–68%".
I have lost smell and taste completely for 3 days, to the point it started in influence my eating habits. I felt hungry, but I'd feel full as soon as I started eating, so I was eating around 30% of the usual intake.
There's some nice chunky research being done by a group at King's using an app where people plug in their symptoms, then they see who gets COVID and who dies etc. Here's a recent summary of their findings:
Perhaps, but I’m awed with how much we do know and how quickly systems have come into place.
New Zealand has been tracing its outbreaks. This has been valuable and has allowed origins be traced quickly and effectively. Maybe I’m too easily impressed by things like the below:
“Using genomic analysis, researchers in New Zealand looked at more than half the confirmed cases in the country and found a staggering 277 separate introductions in the early months, but also that only 19 percent of introductions led to more than one additional case.”
"Perhaps, but I’m awed with how much we do know and how quickly systems have come into place."
Unfortunately, there's a lot of unknown-unknownism going on in that stuff. I've had to watch painfully while people (even "experts") discover things like false-positive rates and PCR cycle count for the first time. It's a bit like living through years of undergraduate science education on fast-forward, but people only read the section headers and never fully grasp the details. Anyone who has actually done a lot of PCR could tell you, for example, that a cycle count in the high-30s is prone to noise, but somehow this became the broad standard we're using in the US.
It's relevant to your comment because a lot of these systems are shoddy (as you would expect), and the confidence in their performance is based more on a faith in shiny things than actual science. So we do things like set up large-scale PCR surveillance, and forget to validate the overall false-positive rate of the system before we start drawing huge extrapolations from the data. Years later, we'll find out that the conclusions were wrong, but nobody will be paying attention by then.
Exactly. Anyone who has been out in public recently probably has little fragments of dead coronavirus genetic material in their respiratory tract, even if they're not infected or infectious. Torture the PCR machine enough and you can eventually squeeze a false positive out of it.
Not only we, but pretty much no one in the field. If you think about it, everybody got it all wrong, even the shape of the so called curve that was supposed to be flattened, the real number of cases, the mortality rate, the useless power of lockdowns in big countries, etc.
I most probably had covid. Had most of the mild sympthoms, but was completely unique for me was the first day when I stopeed feeling hunger.
No feeling of hunger at all, but smell and taste are allright (never failed). I actually have hunger, I can feel hear the noise in my stomach after some hour of having eating very little.
But still, I still don't feel any hunger whatsoever, this was going on for the last 10 days.
At some point this morning I put a lot of salt to the food, see if somehow I'm just remembering the taste, but even if I don't look what I'm eating, some portions had salty taste.
I'm mostly recovered now, and bit weak (tried to do a little run in the garden, and I couldn't run more than a few meters without getting a cough and feeling without air), even given that I didn't had much of trouble with breathing during the maybe 4 days with 2 hours per day of low fever.
But still, the lack of hunger is the weirdest thing I ever experienced.
I had COVID and the loss of smell lasted for 3 days. But it was a complete loss, like, down to 0%. In my wife's case it lasted for a week and returned gradually over the following week.
This has been part of the standard simptoms list in the UK for a while, I've even heard it described as more reliable than a fever/temperature. The confirmation for it came in part from the work done by kings College London using data from the Covid Symptoms Tracker app, which has had several million users logging how they feel every day since about April. I got a test through them (negative thankfully) when I came down with something and reported it in the app.
Haven't we known this for a long time now? Like even back in March? I recently read that you can also have phantom smells with COVID. I looked that up because I thought I had a phantom smell recently, but I think it was actually the heat kicking in when it had been off all summer.
Yes, there were a lot of reports back in March about the loss of smell as a frequent and specific symptom for COVID-19. I'm not sure why this article acts like it's a new thing. And, yes, patients recovering from the loss of smell (hyposmia or anosmia) can often have smell distortions and disturbances (known as parosmias and phantosmias).
I do understand how anosmia can be an easy to detect symptom of COVID-19, and the 80% of positives, but I wonder what other illness can provoke the anosmia in the remaining (negative) 20%?
I've experienced it a couple times after having a bad flu or cold. It usually happens towards the middle the disease, when your nose is completely stuffed. It usually lasts a few days (think two to five days) and - in my case at least - it resolves itself once my cough starts to be more 'productive'.
From the few reports I've heard from people who experienced it because of Covid-19, it seems the Covid-19 experience lasts way longer.
If you have a bad cold and your nose clogs up you can also pretty much lose your smell, but then again you also have typical cold symptoms which isn't really common with covid.
Yes, and as Mayo clinic above lists also polips and a fracture, i.e. unsurprisingly if the nose is clogged or its inner lining is altered, you loose your smell, but I would have thought that the sample was excluding these, either because they can be easily diagnosed (polips or fracture) or - as you say - because typical cold (or allergy) symptoms are not usually connected to Covid-19.
All in all the causes are listed under three main categories:
1. Problems with the inner lining of your nose
2. Obstructions of your nasal passages
3. Damage to your brain or nerves
If - as I think - the first two are excluded, the 20% of non-positives but suffereing from anosmia seems very high to me.
Not sure about anyone else, but I lose my sense of smell regularly when I get a cold. (Not due to being stuffed up -- even when I inhale through my nose I smell nothing.)
I have a hypersensitive sense of taste and smell. I can't handle being around almost all synthetic fragrances. In February, my GF took an air trip to Vancouver BC from Portland. When she returned we both fell ill for 5-8 days. I lost my sense of smell, which was very noticeable to me because usually I smell dryer sheets, detergent and her shampoo. About a month after that I was hospitalized, and subsequently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
“the study does not include a comparison group of people who did not lose their sense of smell and/or taste.”
The headline is horrifically misleading. Media outlets continue to increasingly build narratives of half truths to the point that it’s disgusting. Now with the China Virus we have rampant fear mongering.
Sometimes I wish the news would just give the news. But...then again, it would likely make them go broke..
Might this be a basis of a better mass screening than temperature before entering somewhere? Hand a person a disposable card with a dozen circles on it and ask "which one smells like peppermint"?
I don't think it would be all that much of an improvement. Loss of smell/taste is a pretty good indicator of Covid, but still having smell/taste is not a good indicator of not having Covid.
Excellent suggestion. I would use garlic rather than peppermint because an observer could judge their reaction rather than relying on a verbal response.
> “I can taste strong spices,” she said, “but still no lemon or herbs.”
Hah, that resonated with me. I've had anosmia since birth, and I had a moment this week where I was chewing on rosemary to gauge what its impact on my dish would be, and thought to myself "I really don't get herbs".
Very interesting and beautifully written piece.:-)
Greetings to her, and good luck during pregnancy for you both.
I lost part of my taste for about week around Christmas, and when eating my mother's waffles I thought she had lost her baking touch because it tasted like cardboard. Thankfully my taste was soon recovered, but it made me think of the "small" things we take for granted . . .
The virus attacks the support cells for your olfactory system, but not the system itself. Once the disease is gone, those cells slowly replenish and you regain your sense of smell.
Does this not happen to most people with regular colds?
For at least the past 5-10 years, I've noticed that whenever I get more than a very mild cold, I completely lose my sense of smell for a few days. (I'm talking 100% loss, like holding bananas under my nose and inhaling and smelling nothing.)
I thought that was normal, but everyone making such a big deal out of the loss of smell makes me wonder if I'm unusual for experiencing it with regular colds.
> I thought that was normal, but everyone making such a big deal out of the loss of smell makes me wonder if I'm unusual for experiencing it with regular colds.
It was normal until people started to extremely exaggerate what covid-19 really is to make it seem a lot more dangerous when in fact it is just like influenza.
I can’t downvote yet on this account, so I’ll just comment instead: the truth is almost certainly in the middle.
COVID-19 isn’t a death sentence, it it’s also not “just the flu”. It’s not even related to the flu, and it shares only a subset of symptoms. It’s also got a significantly higher mortality rate and different R0, - it seems to spread more readily and it’s therefore reasonable to believe through slightly different means,
There’s growing evidence that there is a much larger proportion of people who acquire it and develop either no or very minimal symptoms. It’s not at all clear yet if those people shed enough virus particles to be a significant transmission vector.
So, yeah - for many people, COVID-19 is “just the flu” or even “just a runny nose”. We just don’t know how many people are going to react that way, why, who they will be, or what impact they may have in friends and family.
Discounting it as you seem to be is a recipe for unnecessary deaths. Overestimating it is as well.
> Discounting it as you seem to be is a recipe for unnecessary deaths. Overestimating it is as well.
I would agree with this but enough time has passed that we have enough numbers to confirm that the vast majority of healthy (with a small theoretical chance of outliers) will shake COVID off even easier than influenza. ICU beds in all countries were filled predominantly by very obese people or end of life patients with serious health conditions. Basically stop being fat or at least don’t make your unhealthy eating habits the problem of healthy people. At this point it’s clear that we are destroying young lives to protect some people who don’t want to deal with the consequences of their own life choices. There is no way we can protect people without harming others with this virus. So if we have to choose who has to suffer then surely it’s more ethical to let people pick up their own bill rather than punishing people who are innocent and not even in danger. We put people in danger who shouldn’t be in danger. It’s disgusting.
It was Covid-19. Same with my girlfriend. I had the rest of the symptoms at the same time and have since done 6 antibody donations. It's unfortunately a widespread issue and may be permanent for many.
I supplement Zinc as part of my daily stack before, during, and since Covid-19. Unfortunately, this is a relatively widespread issue. They were researching whether it was due to brain damage or damage within the nasal cells themselves and it appears to be the latter. They still haven't figured out if it can be reversed.
Let's not pretend that even the data driven people decry "fearmongering" to anything that wasn't a peer reviewed study published in a journal, even though there were no peer reviewed studies published in journals yet.
I have no idea why you think that there were no studies in April. A quick search shows that's wrong. There were initial reports in March, followed by many peer-reviewed studies that started coming out in April, which were then followed by studies with more objective measures (rather than retrospective self-reports) and larger sample sizes.
I'm sorry, but this is literally the first thing that ever came out about covid and its symptoms. Are people really that inconsiderate or uninformed as to not assume that loss of sense of smell implies covid? I don't see what this article and study contribute to someone concerned about the spread of disease or personal health. No wonder we are still in a pandemic if this is helpful or insightful to people.
