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| Graphic by Ian Dennis - http://www.iandennisgraphics.com. File is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. |
I totally lost my sense of taste and smell in early 2020 when there were only a few known COVID-19 cases in Ireland and loss of taste wasn't one of the recognized symptoms. It was before home test kits were readily available and I never had a test that confirmed I had COVID, but the general belief is that the disease had been circulating in Ireland from the previous autumn. I had no other symptoms and slowly regained my taste and smell over 10 days or so, but it never fully recovered and I still can't properly smell or taste many things, one of which is chocolate. That's understandable since chocolate and coffee are a complex cocktail of hundreds of chemical compounds and I probably lost sensitivity to lots of those. In this article in The Conversation, Ziyad Al-Aly, Chief of Research and Development, VA St. Louis Health Care System and Clinical Epidemiologist, Washington University in St. Louis writes about long COVID and how it affects the body.