Senseless
What it’s like to suffer from the coronavirus’ weirdest symptom
On the first day of spring 2020, Grace Lawlor woke up, brushed her teeth and realized she couldn’t taste her toothpaste. Then she took a shower, and she couldn’t smell her shampoo. It struck her as odd, but she felt fine.
“My roommate and I were almost laughing about it,” says Lawlor, 25, who lives in Boston. “Like, what the heck is this? It was the craziest thing.”
The roommate didn’t believe her, so she decided to prove it by putting hot sauce on her tongue.
“I could literally bite into an onion like it was an apple. And there was just nothing there. It was just absolutely bizarre,” she says.
In a consultation with Dr. Google, she learned that a sudden loss of taste and smell can be a sign of the coronavirus. She went to a doctor, but was told she couldn’t be tested because that clinic was only testing essential workers. Her doctor told her to assume she was positive for COVID-19, so she went to home to quarantine. A few days later, one of her roommates had the same symptoms.
They settled in for a joyless 10 days of putting food in their mouths and swallowing it — “eating” without pleasure. Lawlor bothered with it less and less. “There was no point,” she says. “Even if I had a craving for something ... there was no satisfying it because we couldn’t taste it.”
Elsewhere in Boston, Jenny Dwork came from New York to her mother’s house to work remotely. Dwork felt a little under the weather on March 24 — tired, mild cold symptoms — but was otherwise fine. Until she made herself a shake and realized she could feel “the sensation of the cold, but couldn’t actually taste the ingredients.” Knowing it might be a sign of COVID-19, she went to a drive-through testing center, but was turned away because she had no other symptoms.
For a pandemic illness that can be ghastly and unpredictable, the weirdest symptom is quite common. A study of European COVID-19 patients found that 85.6 percent and 88 percent of patients “reported olfactory and gustatory dysfunctions.” In an Iranian study, 76 percent of COVID-19 patients who reported a loss of smell said it had a sudden onset — as if scent could be switched off like a lightbulb.
Loss of smell or taste could mean someone may be a virus carrier even if they don’t have other symptoms. Rep. Joe Cunningham, DS.C., reported that he tested positive for COVID-19 with only smelland taste-related symptoms. Rudy Gober of the Utah Jazz, the first in the NBA to test positive, says he lost his senses, too. One quarter of people who reported the symptom said it was the only one they experienced.
Which puts the smell and taste victims in the strange position of hearing about patients dying in hospitals and knowing the same virus was in them, too — with effects that are milder, yet freaky.
“It scared the hell out of me,” says Vallery Lomas, a 34-year-old champion baker, who feared she would never get her senses back. “I could smell nothing for probably five days.” That’s an occupational hazard for Lomas. Smell and taste are closely related, and culinary professionals rely on their senses to finetune recipes. Her sense of smell is back, but not 100 percent.
The technical term for a loss of smell sense is anosmia. Congestion is the most common culprit, but some viruses can interfere with olfactory processing. With COVID-19. Some researchers think the virus can target the nervous system through the olfactory bulb in our nose. They’re also paying attention to the olfactory epithelium, the skin surrounding those neurons, which have cells similar to the ones the virus targets in the lungs.
Because neurons regenerate, in “roughly seven days, most people have had some start to recovery,” says James Denneny, executive vice president and CEO of the American Academy of Otolaryngology. Researchers say long-term loss is possible, but rare.
Because smell and taste are intertwined, some people who think they have lost both senses may have only lost their sense of smell. There’s a difference: Taste is the sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami, but flavor is more precise. Plug your nose and try a strawberry and a cherry gummy bear: You’ll be able to tell that both are sweet, but you won’t distinguish between the flavors.