Some Covid survivors haunted by loss of smell and taste

Michele Miller, from Bayside, New York, was infected with the coronavirus in March and has not smelled anything since. Recently, her husband and daughter rushed her out of their house, saying the kitchen was filling up with gas.

She had no idea. “It’s one thing not to smell and not to taste, but it’s survival,” Ms. Miller said.

Humans are constantly scanning their surroundings for scents signaling potential changes and damage, although the process is not always conscious, said Dr Dalton, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center.

The smell alerts the brain to the mundane, like dirty clothes, and the risky, like spoiled food. Without this form of detection, “people worry about things,” said Dr Dalton.

Worse yet, some Covid-19 survivors are plagued by unpleasant and often noxious phantom smells, like the smells of burnt plastic, ammonia, or feces, a distortion called parosmia.

Eric Reynolds, a 51-year-old probation officer in Santa Maria, California, lost his sense of smell when he contracted Covid-19 in April. Now, he says, he often picks up foul smells that he knows don’t exist. Diet drinks taste like dirt; soap and laundry detergent smell like standing water or ammonia.

“I can’t do the dishes, it makes me gag,” Mr. Reynolds said. He is also haunted by the phantom smells of corn chips and a scent he calls “the smell of old lady perfume.”

It’s not unusual for patients like him to develop food aversions linked to their distorted perceptions, said Dr Evan R. Reiter, medical director of the Smell and Taste Center at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has been monitoring the recovery of some 2,000 Covid-19. patients who have lost their sense of smell.