
Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet - samspenc
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-patients-lose-senses-of-taste-smelland-havent-gotten-them-back-11591007522
======
bashinator
I lost my sense of taste a few years ago, from a combination of extreme stress
and the flu. Lasted about a week, and it was utterly terrifying. I first
noticed it when I tried to eat, iirc scrambled eggs, and couldn't stop gagging
on the texture. Once I figured out what was going on, it took a couple days to
figure out what I could eat without retching. I ended up being entirely
vegetarian - meat without taste is a horrible experience, and only ate milk
and eggs as ingredients.

Overall, 0/10, do not recommend unless you have to go vegan but don't have any
willpower. When my sense of taste gradually returned, I practically cried I
was so relieved.

~~~
ceedan
Years ago, I also lost my sense of taste for a few days (toothpaste burned my
tongue)... I would also describe it as terrifying and immediately depressing.
The next day I had pizza and cake with tons of frosting, but everything tasted
like soap. I was really concerned that the damage to my taste was permanent. I
was in disbelief for a few days. As I ate my regular meals, I just reminded
myself that they were things I enjoyed. I can still vividly remember the pink
frosting and the texture of the cake, and the burning sensation on my tongue
that I thought was just a really effective oral hygiene move

~~~
jliptzin
How does toothpaste burn your tongue

~~~
self_awareness
Yes, ceedan says that somewhere in the world there is a toothpaste that if you
use it, it will burn up your tongue and you will loose your sense of taste...
yet doesn't provide the name of the toothpaste. WHY?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I actually read it not as:

Toothpaste burned my tongue, therefore I lost my sense of taste.

but as:

I lost my sense of taste, therefore toothpaste burned my tongue.

which might not make so much sense as an affect of the losing taste, but does
explain why they don't name the toothpaste.

------
disillusioned
I had Covid-19 (confirmed antibodies test, wife had confirmed PCR) in early
March. Lost my sense of smell and taste _completely_, almost immediately. I've
lost some smell before with bad allergies or a congested nose. This was
otherworldly: no smell, at all. Not solvents. Not strong fragrances. Nothing.
And this, with a perfectly clear nose. It freaked me out.

It lasted for about 2.5 weeks. Around week 3, it started to very, very slowly
come back. I went from literally 0.0% to about 10%-15%. I could smell traces
of things if I inhaled very deeply. I was super paranoid it was gone forever.
I can't tell you how joyless eating becomes when you have ZERO sense of taste
or smell.

Finally, around the end of week 4, I was probably close to 75%. I'm _finally_
back to 100% today. This virus sucks.

~~~
sparkywolf
For a medical reason not related to Covid in any way, I've lived my entire
life not being able to smell anything, whatsoever. I'm getting a surgery in
two days that should give me a sense of smell. While I'm over the moon excited
to be able to smell... I didn't even think about how it would affect taste...

~~~
phkahler
What surgery? I know someone with no sense of smell and didnt think there was
any hope of fixing it.

~~~
sparkywolf
Nasal Polypectomy as well as severe deviated septum

------
H8crilA
Losing your sense of smell, while painful, is nothing compared to what other
things can happen to the surviors. 50% of ICU patients have clotting problems.
In fact it's so common that _all_ covid patients are now put on anti-clotting
medication, immediately, no questions asked. Would you mind losing your leg
(getting that clot stuck in lower limbs)? Or getting a stroke (getting that
clot in your brain), and losing a significant part of brain capacity, such as
the ability to speak? Then, 30% have serious kidney problems and require
nephrologist care or outright dialysis [1].

And we're still learning. Never forget the unknown unknowns. It's ridiculous
to quote some survival statistic and call it a covid-barbecue.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-hijacks-the-body-
fr...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-hijacks-the-body-from-head-to-
toe-perplexing-doctors-11588864248)

~~~
GuB-42
And about 30% of ICU patients die. If you get to that point, it is really,
really bad, worse than most cancers.

The thing with losing the sense of smell is that it seems to happen mostly to
mild cases. Cases where you wouldn't even call yourself a "survivor" any more
than you would call yourself a flu survivor or a common cold survivor.

That's the scary part, we are not talking about a few percents, most of them
elderly people. This is about middle aged, healthy people, who may not even be
part of the statistics, and therefore more likely to be underrepresented.

------
ImaCake
I am congenital for anosmia (that is, I have never had a sense of smell) so I
always find discussions about anosmia interesting.

As a contribution: the experiences of never having smelt is very different
from the experience of loosing it later in life. The former is something that
dawns on the person sometime in their youth when they realise they really
can't smell farts. The other is a crushing loss of joy from their lives when
they lose the wonderful taste of food, fresh flowers, and "new car smell"
(whatever that is!). I never _lost_ these things, I love food, and I like
looking at pretty flowers. I am jealous that I don't experience smelling, but
I do not miss it because I never had it in the first place.

As a side note, living with anosmia is mildly inconvienient for most. I am
paranoid about food going off, and working with flammable gasses is always a
little unnerving. Apparently the rates of depression, dysfunctional
relationships, and early death are somewhat higher in my cohort. I personally
have little trouble with it, and find my condition a useful conversation
starter at social events.

~~~
altacc
Thanks for the insight. I can appreciate the paranoia about not smelling
important cues. I once worked in a bio-lab with somebody with anosmia. One day
they accidentally split a very noxious chemical without realising until
somebody else walked into the room, hit the extraction system into overdrive
and pulled them out of the toxic air.

------
macintux
So much emphasis is placed on the fatality rate, but there’s a _lot_ of middle
ground between asymptomatic and dead.

~~~
Mikeb85
This. I had it. Literally every symptom except loss of taste and smell (but
had some other rarer symptoms like the pink eye thing). Also had a cough for
like a month, and loss of energy and breath for about a month and a half. Only
just recently feel 100%.

While it was shitty and lingered a while the worst of it wasn't actually that
much worse than a flu for me. Somewhere between the flu and bronchitis on the
scale of how sick I've been in my life.

~~~
ttul
I had the worst cold I've experienced in a decade or more. Absolute loss of
energy. Terrible aches; temperature all over the place. This was followed by
two months of bronchitis that is still ongoing and failed to respond to two
different kinds of antibiotics (the implication being that it's not
bacterial). I never got tested because testing was not easy to get in early
March; serologies aren't being done yet where I live. I'm so curious: did I
have _IT_?

~~~
ImaCake
There is finally a decent assay for serology so maybe you can get tested soon.
It's not one of the "fast" assay kits (those suck) it is a proper laboratory
assay (an "ELISA") that requires trained staff or at least an expensive
machine to run.

------
gambiting
The thing that people don't realise with virus infections is that it can mess
you up for a long time, even if it's not lethal. I've had a human parvovirus
B19 infection last year(apparently it's incredibly rare in adults, but hey
ho), and yeah, I felt like absolute shit for about 2 months, really high
fevers, no appetite, basically like a very bad flu that lasted nearly 2
months, but then once it finally went away, I started having massive issues
with my joins, widespread inflammation of knees, elbows, shoulders, fingers -
like a bad case of arthritis. Was told by rheumatologists that it's a
relatively common thing to happen after virus infections, since your own
immune system was in high gear after the virus, so now it attacks your own
joints instead. Unfortunately it doesn't really have a cure as such, I was
given a few steroid injections that settled it down for now but it's still not
100% fine. Or I can go on a long term(1-2 years at least) treatment with
methotrexate, but that has a whole lot of its own side effects as well so I'm
not very keen.

So yeah, virus infections SUCK, even if they don't kill you.

~~~
neuronic
Epstein-Barr virus (mono) fucked me up for weeks and I have never been the
same since then.

Jumpstarted hypothyroidism as well which is now autoimmune/Hashimoto's. Virus
infections can really really mess you up.

~~~
loufe
I also had a very rough ride from mono. I was in bed for over a month and came
out some very unpleasant side effects. I developed a tic disorder (suspected
PANDAS) which has lasted the 6 years since and my immune system was so weak I
caught the common cold about once a month for 2 years. Also launched me into
depression which took a couple years to climb out of. It is no joke, that's
for sure.

------
jdkee
There is a lot of evidence for this occurring during the 1918 influenza
pandemic. See [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/22/pale-rider-
lau...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/22/pale-rider-laura-
spinney-review)

~~~
ImaCake
Flu and common colds are known to cause anosmia. I guess the scale of it is
different when its something novel.

------
Animats
We may be entering a new phase of this disease soon. Treatments are coming
along.

Stanford is testing interferon-lambda.[1] Known drug, used for treating
hepatitis. This has to be given early, within 2 days of testing positive for
the virus. A group in the UK is testing interferon-beta.

Eli Lily is testing an engineered antibody.[2] This is new technology, an
antibody specifically targeted to this virus. Testing in humans just started;
no results yet. Lily is putting this into production in advance of testing, to
get the production scaleup problems out of the way, in hope it works.

There are other drugs in development; these are all in human testing now.

Early stage treatment options change things. Advice will change from "stay
home until it gets serious" to "get tested and treated as soon as there's any
suspicion." Instead of overloaded ICUs, front-line medical care gets
overloaded. It really starts to matter than the US doesn't have enough testing
capacity.

[1]
[https://med.stanford.edu/id/covid19/lambda.html](https://med.stanford.edu/id/covid19/lambda.html)

[2] [https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/eli-lilly-abcellera-
coron...](https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/eli-lilly-abcellera-coronavirus-
antibody-drug-first-trial/578980/)

------
dt_nl
Hi there, dutch male, just under 60, overall good health, healthy way of
living. Halfway march I noticed light Covid related stuff like higher temp
(for just 1 day), headache (longer period, not every day), no energy (6 weeks)
and then a loss of taste and smell (not very suddenly as I recall). After 7 to
8 weeks taste came back lightly (like smelling toiletcleaner and strong
things) and now after a recovery to +- 25% of smell and taste, it is again
getting less (10%). And all the time a totally free breathing through the
nose. I can taste salt and sweet but for Instance no garlic. And one other
noticable thing, both sides under the back of my tongue feel like they are a
bit irritated, lightly swollen salivary glands (for what it is worth).

------
halotrope
For older people loss of smell seems to indicate a higher probability to die
within 5 years.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182669/#!po=0....](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182669/#!po=0.877193)

~~~
hinkley
Food poisoning will get ya. That’s why we have this chemistry lab in our
heads, taking up a bunch of useful space in the center.

------
misja111
My mother (73) had Corona in March. She had a throat ache, headache and loss
of sense of smell and taste. The symptoms passed after a couple of days but
her sense of smell did not come back. Even today, almost 3 months later, it
has still not fully recovered.

------
lykr0n
Well, that truly sucks. COVID-19 is going to cause long term problems for this
generation. I'm glad I got over it without issue, but I have to wonder what's
in store for my future.

~~~
adventured
I'll be surprised if over time a few million people in the US don't end up
with blood clot related complications from having mild cases of Covid. I
suspect the healthcare industrial complex will wave their hands at the notion
that Covid caused the damage (they do this with anything inconvenient to their
interests, like the millions of people damaged by Cipro, a drug they've handed
out like candy to millions of people for decades), it'll largely get
buried/lost in the outsized cardiovascular & other health problem numbers in
the American population.

~~~
lykr0n
I'm not so sure. We're already starting to see people publish studies on how
nasty this is an long term issues. This is too big for it to be ignored down
the road.

Time is all it will take for us to know.

------
theonemind
Interestingly, not exactly COVID-19 related, people that lose their sense of
taste return to eating normally, but people that lose a sense of feel in their
mouth never seem to fully recover their appetite.

I mean, not to say I want to lose my sense of taste, just that losing feel in
your mouth seems probably worse.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Yeah, texture is a surprisingly large part of what people enjoy about food.
It's honestly weird that we consider it a separate thing from taste, since you
take it into account almost as much as flavor when you cook.

------
chadcmulligan
A friend of mine lost his sense of smell some years ago from the flu

~~~
snazz
Are there any published statistics on how common that is? I wonder what it
inflames or irritates that can't come back after the body recovers from the
virus.

~~~
zelphirkalt
That's also what I am wondering about. Could it also have a psychological
component? (Not making it any less terrifying.)

~~~
ImaCake
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Negative placebo effect is real and
anosmia (smell blindness) has been making headlines with the 'rona.

To answer the original question: "Postviral olfactory disorders usually occur
after an upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) associated with a common
cold or influenza. With a prevalence between 11 and 40% they are among the
common causes of olfactory disorders."

From here:
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16733337/?from_term=anosmia+...](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16733337/?from_term=anosmia+influenza&from_pos=3)

------
amelius
Slightly offtopic warning. I temporarily lost my sense of smell when I was on
a zinc supplement (lozenges). It turned out this is a known effect of zinc
lozenges. Zinc supplements should be swallowed immediately. Stay away from
nasal sprays that contain zinc.

More information:

[https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Zinc-
Health%20Professional...](https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Zinc-
Health%20Professional/)

(search for "anosmia", the medical term for loss of sense of smell)

------
jshaqaw
I lost my sense of smell for about a mo th which was my primary Covid symptom.
I think I am now back at least 75% after two months (I was in the early wave
of NYC).

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/OaNuq](https://archive.md/OaNuq)

~~~
apanoia
Thanks!!

------
bryanrasmussen
This is actually why I just posted this [https://gizmodo.com/this-lickable-
screen-can-recreate-almost...](https://gizmodo.com/this-lickable-screen-can-
recreate-almost-any-taste-or-f-1843609903) "This Lickable Screen Can Recreate
Almost Any Taste or Flavor Without Eating Food"

I wonder if the process outlined could be used in therapy to bring back taste.

------
random_upvoter
I had some flu thing in the beginning of February and I had this weird symptom
where anything that contained vinegar (like ketchup) had this terrible
acetone-like taste -- I almost brought back the bottle to the store for a
refund.

------
eluusive
Okay... so? This is a symptom of many viruses. My sister got Bell's Palsy from
the flu a couple months ago and still hasn't recovered.

What are the _relative rates_ of these issues with nCoV-19 over Rhinovirus,
normal Coronavirus, and Flu A/B?

Any neurotropic virus can cause this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosmia#List_of_causes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosmia#List_of_causes)

Examples of such viruses:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotropic_virus#Examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotropic_virus#Examples)

 _Influenza_

------
NoPicklez
This is what worries me most about being a mid 20's person during the
pandemic.

I know its unlikely I'd die if I contracted but if it left me with significant
long term health problems, that's what keeps me inside.

------
freecodyx
I remeber I was always happy when I lose my sense of taste and smell because
of flu, this will help eat more, I don't eat a lot, and my options are limited
because of high sense of smell and taste,

~~~
samatman
That... doesn't sound typical of influenza, to put it mildly.

Blunted senses are the last thing on my mind with persistent nausea,
dizziness, sweating buckets, and having to lean on the wall on the way to the
kitchen.

------
perl4ever
I know someone who is in the age range most vulnerable to covid-19 who always
says she has no sense of smell, but my impression is it's a long-standing
thing, possibly related to allergies or something.

------
steveeq1
"some"

------
hkai
Apparently that's a very small number, so that anecdote is irrelevant.

------
marcell
Taste is highly related to smell, and smell is related to congestion symptoms
that are typical for respiratory diseases.

Taste and smell loss happens with cold and flu as well, since they are also
respiratory diseases: [1]

> The exact mechanism behind post-viral anosmia [smell/taste loss] isn’t yet
> understood, but it is clear that the various viruses that cause the common
> cold, including flu, somehow damage and interfere with the olfactory
> epithelium

Let's not get carried away with the Covid fear hysteria. This is just an
example of a risk that already existed that was never on society's collective
radar.

Moreover, it's only been a few weeks or months. It's entirely likely that the
taste/smell loss is temporary.

[1] [https://www.fifthsense.org.uk/post-viral-olfactory-
loss/](https://www.fifthsense.org.uk/post-viral-olfactory-loss/)

~~~
pmiller2
The article is literally talking about how loss of taste and smell can
profoundly affect someone. It's the exact opposite of "fear hysteria." From
the article:

> Out of 417 patients who suffered mild to moderate forms of Covid-19 in
> Europe, 88% and 86% reported taste and smell dysfunctions, respectively,
> according to a study published in April in the European Archives of Oto-
> Rhino-Laryngology.

> Most patients said they couldn’t taste or smell even after other symptoms
> were gone. Preliminary data showed at least a quarter of people regained
> their ability to taste and smell within two weeks of other symptoms
> dissipating. The study said long-term data are needed to assess how long
> this can last in people who didn’t report an improvement.

Right here it is saying that about 25% of patients recover their senses of
taste and smell. That means that probably 75% do not. The article spends the
entire rest of its word count on explaining the terrible effects this has on
those people.

Can you explain to me how that would be considered "hysteria" given how
contagious this disease is? That just seems utterly dismissive of these
peoples' suffering to me.

~~~
mmmeff
Thank you. As someone suffering with this disease long-term (75 days and
counting) it's really nice to see someone unaffected speaking the voice of
reason and compassion.

