It's also a pretty common side effect of colds, flu's, and sinus infections. [1]
I never understood why loss of smell became such a focus with Covid, that symptom wasn't novel and I never found anything definitive studies finding it to be more common with Covid vs the others.
Complete anosmia with cold/flu/sinus infection is rare. Typically you can't smell anything because your nasal passages and olfactory bulb are fully occluded by excess mucus. The loss of smell is physical. If you blow your nose you can usually still smell a bit.
With COVID the loss of smell was fully neurological. It's like...a null vs. a 0. And it persisted in some cases, to the point that some Long COVID cases had to retrain their palates to fully taste food (e.g. overcoming aversion to alliums). That was the novelty.
"Long COVID-19 anosmia fatigue could result from damage to olfactory sensory neurons, leading to an augmentation in the resistance to cerebrospinal fluid outflow by the cribriform plate, and further causing congestion of the glymphatic system with subsequent toxic build-up in the brain... SARS-CoV-2 can either travel via peripheral blood vessels causing endothelial dysfunction, triggering coagulation cascade and multiple organ dysfunction, or reach the systemic circulation and take a different route to the blood–brain barrier, damaging the blood–brain barrier and leading to neuroinflammation and neuronal excitotoxicity."
Maybe my experience was different but the lack of smell from COVID was farrrrr more acute and noticeable than I’ve ever had with a sinus infection. It was like the sensation just starkly disappeared rather than diminished. It was really one of the most disconcerting symptoms I had if I’m honest!
There's a physical aspect as well as a mental aspect to it. Media is constantly feeding you information about loss of smell (even though I've lost it at least a few times before with viruses).
I am very much in the skeptical camp when it comes to many things with COVID, and open to all sorts of arguments that the nature of the virus and treatments for it do not adhere to what you might call the "orthodox" perspective presented on CNN and enforced by Facebook and Twitter moderators with comms degrees. That said, while the nocebo effect is definitely a thing, my own experience with my first infection was different enough from any other illnesses to this point that I'm convinced these symptoms and their severity were not just a matter of media hype. My first sign of COVID was major conjunctivitis in one eye, which for about an hour was associated with enough pressure I thought I might need to go to urgent care. Then, I had been completely recovered for about a week after I was infected, thought I was over it completely, and then noticed I couldn't smell the family dog and the only thing I was still able to taste was pickles. It should at least be possible to acknowledge the novelty of these symptoms without worrying that they make any sort of case for the propriety of the response or the encouragement of the public to treat SARS-CoV-2 like a virus from a zombie movie.
A friend of mine also lost his sense of smell for weeks, he also found that he absolutely hated the taste of hot coffee for months (cold brew didn't bother him)
My original one was simply that anecdotal accounts of loss of smell didn't seem to pan out to a significant difference in frequency compared to other common cold and flu's.
I could buy that maybe COVID had "some effect on smell" at about the same rate as the common viruses, but it was the intensity which made it more noticeable.
That's definitely possible, I was only talking about frequency. Intensity is a tricky one to track because it can only be based on self-report studies, and you only hav a frame of reference if a previous illness at least partially knocked out your sense of smell.
My ex's kids turned off the freezer in my garage while playing (turned a knob they didn't understand) causing all the food to spoil and I didn't smell it because I couldn't smell it. Turns out it was the media's misinformation in my garage all along.
I've actually had the opposite. I have lost my sense of taste for a couple weeks with previous illnesses. With what I'm pretty sure was Covid I had a killer headache on day one and a cough that lasted weeks, but never lost smell or taste.
I say I'm pretty sure it was Covid because the timing, exposure, and symptoms all lines up but I never actually got a positive test result from at home tests.
I lost 50% of my smell from covid. Not that I could smell things at half strength, no. I got out all my spices and smelled each one. Lemon pepper, yes, Cumin, no, oregano yes, cloves no, and so on. I could smell half the spices just fine and the other half not at all. I've never experienced anything like it in my life.
That's a really interesting one for sure, though still it's anecdotal and I at least haven't been able to find a solid study showing a higher frequency of loss of smell symptoms with Covid.
Someone I know lost the ability to sense many organosulfur compounds after having Covid. Garlic is tasteless/smell-less mass, rotten eggs don't smell like anything. I don't think I've ever heard of sinus infections of any kind causing that kind of change for going on 3 years. That's pretty weird considering how sensitive humans are to organosulfur compounds.
paired with diminished taste and continued mentions of potential chronic ongoing fatigue and mental fog, it probably got mentally weighted higher as something to be defensive toward
it's a pretty primal human fear to be stripped one by one of your senses, considering it's not as common in other cases of illness VS the sudden worldwide common repeated exposure to covid when in some public places, added on with some general anxiety from covid it's not entirely hard to understand others viewpoints being emotionally skewed
I have in the past lost my sense of smell due to polyps in my sinuses that were caused by allergies. Removal of the polyps fully restored my sense of smell (even made it better than before)
I never understood why loss of smell became such a focus with Covid, that symptom wasn't novel and I never found anything definitive studies finding it to be more common with Covid vs the others.
[1] https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/smell-and-taste-diso...