Long COVID-19 symptoms: Some survivors are haunted by loss of smell and taste

Until March, when everything started tasting like cardboard, Katherine Hansen had such a keen sense of smell that she could recreate almost any restaurant dish at home without the recipe, just by recalling the scents and flavours. “Smell is not something we pay a lot of attention to until it’s gone,” said Pamela Dalton, who studies smell’s link to cognition and emotion at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Like a part of me is missing, as I can no longer smell and experience the emotions of everyday basic living.” Another said, “I feel discombobulated — like I don’t exist. He’s also haunted by phantom smells of corn chips and a scent he calls “old lady perfume smell.” It’s not unusual for patients like Reynolds to develop food aversions related to their distorted perceptions, said Dr Evan R. Reiter, medical director of the smell and taste centre at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has been tracking the recovery of some 2,000 COVID-19 patients who lost their sense of smell. One of his patients is recovering, but “now that it’s coming back, she’s saying that everything or virtually everything that she eats will give her a gasoline taste or smell,” Reiter said.