One of the symptoms of COVID-19 is anosmia, or loss of odor and taste. Nearly a year into the pandemic, a small number of people who have otherwise recovered from the new coronavirus have not yet regained these senses, which has led doctors and researchers to explore the many ways in which anosmia can change one’s life, studied, usually worse.
“You consider it an aesthetic sense,” said Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta of Harvard Medical School in a recent report in the New York Times.‘But when someone is denied his sense of smell, it changes the way they perceive the environment and their place in the environment. People’s sense of well-being is declining. It can be really shocking and upsetting. ”
The Times says prolonged anosmia can lead to ‘social isolation and anhedonia, an inability to feel pleasure, as well as a strange feeling of aloofness and isolation’, in addition to a loss of appetite. Dr. Datta says that although long-term loss of odor and taste is rare in those who contracted COVID-19, enough people have had it (more than 20 million in the US), so “we are talking about possibly millions of people.”
All in all, this is just another potentially terrible side effect of the pandemic, which is spreading across the country at worse rates than ever due to a lack of government action and financial relief that enables everyone to stay at home safely.