I lost my sense of taste a few years ago, from a combination of extreme stress and the flu. Lasted about a week, and it was utterly terrifying. I first noticed it when I tried to eat, iirc scrambled eggs, and couldn't stop gagging on the texture. Once I figured out what was going on, it took a couple days to figure out what I could eat without retching. I ended up being entirely vegetarian - meat without taste is a horrible experience, and only ate milk and eggs as ingredients.
Overall, 0/10, do not recommend unless you have to go vegan but don't have any willpower. When my sense of taste gradually returned, I practically cried I was so relieved.
About 5 years ago I got a cold or flu while travelling. I flew home (3 hour flight) when my head was at its worst, eyes wouldn't stop watering, blocked up nose, sore throat.
When we came into land my left ear didn't pop and I went completely deaf in my left ear. I was so freaked out by it. If I snapped my fingers next to my left ear I couldn't hear it at all. Doctor told me to not worry, it will come back, asked me to go see him if it wasn't normal again after 1 month.
About 2 weeks later I was sitting at work and out of no where i had this weird sensation in my left ear and in a few seconds it was like a increasing rush of air followed by a popping sound and my hearing was back, I was shocked I stood up in the office and was like "MY HEARING IS BACK!", I was so happy.
Even tho I could ear from my right ear, it was a horrible experience. I couldn't imagine permanently losing any sensory be it hearing, taste, vision, smell, touch. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone.
Similar thing happened. I was on a flight, totally normal. During the flight my nose blocks up a little bit.
As we land, the worst kind of “your head is going to explode” sensation. Eyes watering. So much pain I’m rocking back and forward in my seat. Nothing can be done. Nothing can stop it.
Ended up losing my hearing (both ears) for 2 months, everything sounded like it was underwater, not even distant. But underwater.
Anyway. Turns out I have some random allergy to birch trees and being within 2km of one when it’s pollinating can block me up.
Utterly horrifying experience. Losing a sense is no joke. Makes you understand how fragile the human form is.
> About 5 years ago I got a cold or flu while travelling. I flew home (3 hour flight) when my head was at its worst, eyes wouldn't stop watering, blocked up nose, sore throat.
Just a polite reminder to people to please stop doing this. The flu kills people. Stay out of aircraft if you have it, please.
Years ago, I also lost my sense of taste for a few days (toothpaste burned my tongue)... I would also describe it as terrifying and immediately depressing. The next day I had pizza and cake with tons of frosting, but everything tasted like soap. I was really concerned that the damage to my taste was permanent. I was in disbelief for a few days. As I ate my regular meals, I just reminded myself that they were things I enjoyed. I can still vividly remember the pink frosting and the texture of the cake, and the burning sensation on my tongue that I thought was just a really effective oral hygiene move
"perfect sense" is a movie about a virus attack, where people starts to loose all 6 senses gradually. Must watch!!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1439572/
I remembered this movie because, when people losses their sense of taste, the hotels re-invent it's business model by serving food with different textures!!
Wow, that's a movie right for the current situation. I know this isn't actually related, but a virus causing loss of smell and irresistible anger, with scenes of rioting...
PS: don't get me wrong, this is just in the film. I know that the anger in US is caused by police's wrongdoings.
Yes, ceedan says that somewhere in the world there is a toothpaste that if you use it, it will burn up your tongue and you will loose your sense of taste... yet doesn't provide the name of the toothpaste. WHY?
It was a chemical burn from brushing my tongue with toothpaste and not rinsing soon after. It was probably some kind of Crest or Colgate toothpaste. This was like 15 years ago so I hope the ingredients have changed.
This is actually a good anecdote, which makes me wonder: Did we evolve our taste mechanism to make meat and everything nourishing to taste good, so we can actively seek and put effort into acquiring next meal that tastes better?
Yes. That is what taste and smell are for. Unfortunately people have figured out how to grow/make/prepare food that tastes good but is not good for us.
I once loss most of my taste sense, and only could taste the sweet. It might seem like a cool thing, but it's annoying as hell. Everything tasted sweet. A nice beer turned into a disgusting carbonated drink. Eating a burger was like chewing mushy candy. I didn't feel like eating anything.
Curious, my partner is also extremely texture-sensitive and has not been able to stand eating eggs or meat for as long as they can remember, but can definitely sense smell and taste. I wonder if there's some interesting connection there.
This type of texture aversion is not uncommon with people who have sensory processing or autism spectrum disorder and there's a lot of people who don't fall within those groups but have some of those traits in the same way. Aversion to the texture of meat, mushrooms and tomatoes are quite common. Sometimes this goes along with pica, which is the tendency to want to eat things that others consider not edible like cardboard, dirt or rubber.
Let me tell you about the horror that is vanilla pudding with vanilla ice cream. The textures clash in a way that is just.. terrible. But also kind of interesting.
I love the taste of oatmeal in milk but can't stand the texture. The way I eat is very slowly with a small spoon. Since COVID, I've been eating milk+oatmeal every day (powder milk and oatmeal have almost infinite life) so I definitely got better at eating it. But I still can't stand putting a big spoonful of it in my mouth, even though I love the taste and smell!
lost the feeling of hunger for a few years due to medication I was on and barely have much sense of taste to begin with. My nose is often stuffed rendering me barely able to taste and smell most foods. This combined with a need for a high calorie intake I cannot say that I felt any qualms with meats but eating as a chore is horrible and a most disgusting feeling, the mechanical movement and disassociation that comes with this numbness is something people will adapt to however, and can be beneficial when making choices on what to eat.
I have periods of a few days every so often where I completely lose my appetite due to my ADHD medication. It's fascinating how something that's usually such a pleasure becomes a complete chore. I need to force myself to eat, literally stuffing food into my mouth and methodically chewing, there's no enjoyment whatsoever, no matter what I eat it feels like I'm eating sawdust.
Usually when it happens I switch from eating solid food to liquid meal replacements and tinned fruit, things I can more or less just pour down my throat.
I lost my sense of smell for about 6 months following a bad cold/ something flu-y. Initially I didn;t really notice - I wasn't enjoying food much, but it was when I was painting a room and realised I couldn't smell paint that I really noticed.
I remember when it came back. Someone made me a cup of tea (I'm British) and I rhapsodised for about 5 minutes about what an excellent cup of tea it was. Up until then, I couldn't really detect any difference between tea and coffee.
FWIW critical lack of zinc is associated with loss of smell and taste. Apparently the body consumes a lot of zinc to fight viruses. You might benefit of supplementing for while.
I lost most of my sense of smell a few years ago. I've lost much of my ability to differentiate tastes as well.
As a former supertaster, lover of bourbon (I used to be able to tell my bourbons apart by smell), serious cook, and total foodie this has been the most depressing experience in my life.
Think about the experience that you have when you walk from one room to another, or into a field of flowers. I can't smell the differences between rooms, I can't smell the flowers, I can't even smell smoke.
People love to say you're so lucky you can't smell all of those bad smells but life isn't about the bad smells. Smell is memory. We wake up and smell the air around us, the dirt, the trees, the people we love, the people we hate, even exhaust fumes. The smell of ink on paper, spices, lavender, tea, the air after an electrical storm, the subtleties in beer, freshly fallen snow, rain, grass, the aroma of wine, freshly roasted coffee. I can no longer smell any of that.
When I realized that my loss of sense of smell was permanent I was suicidal for many months. I've gotten over that feeling for the most part and now I work to make the best of it because this is just the way that things are.
We all have our challenges. When faced with things that we can't change the best way forward is to work with what we have and make the best of it. Since I can no longer tell when food is ready by the change of smell I have to pay close attention to what it looks like and use a thermometer to carefully monitor its temperature. I can't tell when something is burning.
I've installed gas sensors in my house because I can't smell the gas that comes out of my gas range but I refuse to cook on electric. I have an induction burner but it's not the same. You can't beat fire. And I'm not giving up. I've gotten pretty good at roasting coffee but mostly by eye.
My 1966 Volvo caught fire as I was driving because I couldn't smell the gas coming out of the leaking fuel pump or the smoke coming out of the engine.
Fortunately my neighbor was in the passenger seat and he pointed out that the engine was on fire. He kept telling me that the car was beginning to smell a lot like fuel and he asked me if he could open the windows. (It's an old car so things break easily.) Fortunately the car didn't explode and we got out safely.
Loss of smell is no fun. Try cooking or eating while holding your nose. You'll get the idea. Just keep in mind that it's always like that. You can breathe in as deeply as you like and you still won't get the smells. You won't create the new memories and you'll have a hard time recalling the various smells that you've grown up with. They'll fade with time.
Err... I'm not trying to sound snarky at all, and as somebody with raging un-curable tinnitus and other severe health ailments, I can definitely relate and feel awful for your loss of smell.
But like... are you sure you weren't some sort of super-smeller before hand? I don't appear to have smell issues (I believe) - but I definitely don't experience the subtleties you did, and that's coming from a person who obsesses over the fine details of things. Maybe I have some slight smell issues...
I have a lot of sympathy for you, for what it's worth. Like I said, losing my sense of taste for just a week and change was utterly terrifying. I'm very sorry for your loss.
I've been interested in sensory prosthetics for a while now. Using alternate sensory routes for balance, or sight, is a thing. I wish I were hearing more about it in mainstream science news - it seems like giving blind people 3D lidar perception through a grid of skin cells would be a good thing. Scent would be orders of magnitude more complex, but maybe still a good goal for future R&D?
Yes, definitely! It also tends to jog other memories from long ago, things that you had otherwise forgotten can suddenly be brought forward by the right smell.
Fun fact, I was born without a sense of smell. Texture is a huge part of my enjoyment of food -- probably obviously -- and what caused the OP revulsion are things I enjoy, as another first-hand anecdote.
Ben & Jerry's ice cream has large chunks of toppings because Ben Cohen had a reduced ability to smell. He charactized quality heavily towards texture of the ice cream resulting in what Ben & Jerry's is know for today.
There’s a good story in the Ben & Jerry’s cookbook about how Ben and Jerry argued about which size chunks of Heath bar to use in their ice cream.
They ended up with the perfect mix of little shards and big chunks by freezing a case of Heath bars and throwing it onto the concrete floor from the top of a ladder.
Making your own isn’t hard at all if you have the kitchen space to store a machine. The cheaper ($50-70) ones where you pre-freeze an ice pack are plenty to get started. It really isn’t much more than stirring and then waiting.
That's crazy and I admittedly didn't know that's possible. Sorry to hear that. :(
I have an issue where I have these crazy, unusual "allergic" reactions (doctors I've gone to actually say it's "hypersensitivity" rather than a normal "allergy"), and one of the weird "symptoms" is that if I'm out and about while reacting to something I ate, my sense of smell gets severely heightened. I'll smell food cooking at restaurants and feel more disgusted than not, even for stuff I'd generally enjoy all the time.
> That's crazy and I admittedly didn't know that's possible. Sorry to hear that. :(
Eh, it's okay, but thank you. :) If you have to lose a sense smell is the one. It's a genetic abnormality that you'll find in some Appalachian families so I'm not even particularly unusual among my kin.
> I have an issue where I have these crazy, unusual "allergic" reactions (doctors I've gone to actually say it's "hypersensitivity" rather than a normal "allergy"), and one of the weird "symptoms" is that if I'm out and about while reacting to something I ate, my sense of smell gets severely heightened. I'll smell food cooking at restaurants and feel more disgusted than not, even for stuff I'd generally enjoy all the time.
> Pretty crazy how human biology works.
Wow, now that's wild and I'm sorry to hear it. I'd say being disgusted by stuff you normally enjoy is a rougher burden than just being short a sense!
I assume it was more the abrupt change in the taste, rather than anything inherent in the texture. It was the culinary equivalent of not realizing you're stepping off a curb, and flailing for balance.
thats very interesting. in 2012, I got the worst sick I have ever been. body pain so bad it helped to moan to ease the pain, and a really bad pnenomia. but one of the things that was the kicker, eating food caused me to gag. I couldnt do it, I wonder if I had lost my sense of smell and didnt know it.
I was ready to accept it for the rest of my life. Got the subscriptions to various meal replacements, started mourning. I was also in a pretty depressive state, which I imagine didn't help my immune system with the flu, or my optimism for the future.
I love steak with no seasoning. And I brought up the animal products because they were the most extreme example, but I also couldn't eat raw lettuce (tasted like cardboard). As a salad lover, this fucked me up almost as badly as the meat. I was pretty much doing peanuts, noodles, tofu, and meal supplement shakes.
I had Covid-19 (confirmed antibodies test, wife had confirmed PCR) in early March. Lost my sense of smell and taste _completely_, almost immediately. I've lost some smell before with bad allergies or a congested nose. This was otherworldly: no smell, at all. Not solvents. Not strong fragrances. Nothing. And this, with a perfectly clear nose. It freaked me out.
It lasted for about 2.5 weeks. Around week 3, it started to very, very slowly come back. I went from literally 0.0% to about 10%-15%. I could smell traces of things if I inhaled very deeply. I was super paranoid it was gone forever. I can't tell you how joyless eating becomes when you have ZERO sense of taste or smell.
Finally, around the end of week 4, I was probably close to 75%. I'm _finally_ back to 100% today. This virus sucks.
For a medical reason not related to Covid in any way, I've lived my entire life not being able to smell anything, whatsoever. I'm getting a surgery in two days that should give me a sense of smell. While I'm over the moon excited to be able to smell... I didn't even think about how it would affect taste...
Just another anecdote: my grandmother lost her sense of smell in her 20s after a car crash. Her cooking skills were pretty ok. She wasn't an amazing cook, but definitely made food better than me and my mom.
Very interesting description, since the early casual discussions of this symptom assumed that it was simply mechanical ('flu symptoms, inflamed mucous membranes, stuffed nose, of course they can't smell). Later I saw it described as a neurological issue and so potentially being a lot more serious, which your experience seems to support.
Other than the concomitant anxiety and stress ("freaked me out") did you notice other neurological symptoms?
it's definitely not stuffy nose, I had the same utterly dry nose. In fact I felt more aware of the inside of my sinuses than I ever have before... they felt completely empty. It was almost nice except that it was really freaky and something felt off about the sensation.
My nose has recovered significantly and I have a more familiar pressure in my cheekbones and forehead that was missing when I was sick.
IMO, based entirely on my own anecdotal experience, it's probably that the virus is really, really lethal against the respiratory lining. I have no idea what would make it so specific- maybe ACE? But it felt like it was just burning through my lungs and then my nose. It felt... dead, inside.
The ~8 hour period of losing my sense of smell was characterized by an extremely powerful smell of snot and a subtle kind of ammonia-like sensation. The distinctive smell of snot is apparently mostly due to free radicals generated by dying cells. I'm not sure this contradicts with nerve-related action though, which could presumably cause similar sensations.
Suspected case here with similar symptoms a few months ago. Eating felt so weird. It's really just sad and bizarre, like your brain is almost reflexively telling you you're eating something inedible because you're not getting the taste and smell feedback of "this is food". I was so relieved when both senses started gradually coming back.
Pretty much exactly the same thing happened to me. I had a very mild case of suspected Covid-19 (no fever or cough). However, I was mildly fatigued for weeks afterwards, and my sense of smell, though it has returned, is still not at 100%. As you say, the freaky thing about it is that you really lose your sense of smell completely. It's quite different to the experience you have with a cold or a stuffed up nose.
No, that doesn't track. Smell impairment (not even loss) only comes with very severe zinc deficiency- which is not happening over a single day. I lost my sense of smell over roughly 8 hours. There are also tons of other symptoms of zinc poisoning that would be very obvious. It doesn't make sense that it would do smell, but not sight or hair loss.
People have been trying to tie covid to zinc since the beginning, IMO mostly out of desperation. Zinc oral sprays were pulled by the FDA for causing permanent total loss of smell- by coating the inside of your nose with zinc. People just wanted it to be related.
Did you have no sense of taste at all? I had to live with almost no sense of smell for about 20 years, but I could taste sweet and salty. So if you put a spoon of sugar in your mouth, there was no sense of sweetness at all? If so, that would really be a next level experience.
For me, I could not tell the difference between coffee and water. Energy drinks did not taste at all sweet; they felt slightly syrupy/viscous and I could feel the bubbles on my tongue. I could sense saltiness to some degree, but not in a way I can relate to how I taste things now.
Interested to know how that happened! I've got a neurological condition (MS) that one time meant that sweet tasted bitter, but only on one side of my tongue. It wasn't a pleasant experience, but thankfully it only lasted a couple of weeks before improving and eventually returning to normal (for now).
Same here. Recovered approx 6 weeks ago and coffee only just tastes reasonable again. My eating habits have changed in the recovery time. Probably for the better!
I lost my sense of smell for a couple months for other reasons, and yeah it's awful. Lost a lot of weight because I didn't eat as much, or as often. I've never been a big eater/foodie to begin with but it surprised me how little interest I had in food.
Losing your sense of smell, while painful, is nothing compared to what other things can happen to the surviors. 50% of ICU patients have clotting problems. In fact it's so common that all covid patients are now put on anti-clotting medication, immediately, no questions asked. Would you mind losing your leg (getting that clot stuck in lower limbs)? Or getting a stroke (getting that clot in your brain), and losing a significant part of brain capacity, such as the ability to speak? Then, 30% have serious kidney problems and require nephrologist care or outright dialysis [1].
And we're still learning. Never forget the unknown unknowns. It's ridiculous to quote some survival statistic and call it a covid-barbecue.
And about 30% of ICU patients die. If you get to that point, it is really, really bad, worse than most cancers.
The thing with losing the sense of smell is that it seems to happen mostly to mild cases. Cases where you wouldn't even call yourself a "survivor" any more than you would call yourself a flu survivor or a common cold survivor.
That's the scary part, we are not talking about a few percents, most of them elderly people. This is about middle aged, healthy people, who may not even be part of the statistics, and therefore more likely to be underrepresented.
I think in high school someone was trying to scare us into not driving drunk or recklessly, and imprinted on me that while you may see in the newspaper someone is no longer in "critical" condition, and be like "oh, good they're fine now" they may have devastating life long effects.
No matter what kind of illness or injury, you don't see how bad and permanent it often is unless you are personally involved or close to the person, but by the time you are an adult, you should know this is generally the case. The outside world, including the keepers of medical statistics write down on their scorecard that someone recovered, but it's not really like that.
My personal observation is that even if you know that to be the case, it's all to easy to fool yourself using the platitudes that knowing it should prevent.
It's only really people who live with conditions that have long term effects on your life that really understand it.
From uk experience if you go into ICU or any high risk ward they tend to put you in the inflatable leg splints.
Serous kidney problems are no joke and you might well end up with chronic kidney failure - so you will be on the pathway to dialysis and transplant in the future.
Not 50%, but a significant portion - IIRC the South Korea studies had 30% prevalence of smell loss for infected with mild symptoms; but it generally was temporary, unlike the cases described in this article.
Sense of taste is strongly influenced by sense of smell, and a stuffy nose significantly attenuates your sense of smell. As such, basically every cold ever will knock out both your sense of smell and consequently your sense of taste for the duration.
Hyposmia is also, in its own right, a symptom of the flu, of the common cold and of sinusitis. [1]
I am congenital for anosmia (that is, I have never had a sense of smell) so I always find discussions about anosmia interesting.
As a contribution: the experiences of never having smelt is very different from the experience of loosing it later in life. The former is something that dawns on the person sometime in their youth when they realise they really can't smell farts. The other is a crushing loss of joy from their lives when they lose the wonderful taste of food, fresh flowers, and "new car smell" (whatever that is!). I never lost these things, I love food, and I like looking at pretty flowers. I am jealous that I don't experience smelling, but I do not miss it because I never had it in the first place.
As a side note, living with anosmia is mildly inconvienient for most. I am paranoid about food going off, and working with flammable gasses is always a little unnerving. Apparently the rates of depression, dysfunctional relationships, and early death are somewhat higher in my cohort. I personally have little trouble with it, and find my condition a useful conversation starter at social events.
Thanks for the insight. I can appreciate the paranoia about not smelling important cues. I once worked in a bio-lab with somebody with anosmia. One day they accidentally split a very noxious chemical without realising until somebody else walked into the room, hit the extraction system into overdrive and pulled them out of the toxic air.
This. I had it. Literally every symptom except loss of taste and smell (but had some other rarer symptoms like the pink eye thing). Also had a cough for like a month, and loss of energy and breath for about a month and a half. Only just recently feel 100%.
While it was shitty and lingered a while the worst of it wasn't actually that much worse than a flu for me. Somewhere between the flu and bronchitis on the scale of how sick I've been in my life.
I had the worst cold I've experienced in a decade or more. Absolute loss of energy. Terrible aches; temperature all over the place. This was followed by two months of bronchitis that is still ongoing and failed to respond to two different kinds of antibiotics (the implication being that it's not bacterial). I never got tested because testing was not easy to get in early March; serologies aren't being done yet where I live. I'm so curious: did I have _IT_?
There is finally a decent assay for serology so maybe you can get tested soon. It's not one of the "fast" assay kits (those suck) it is a proper laboratory assay (an "ELISA") that requires trained staff or at least an expensive machine to run.
Working in a tourist town, in the hospitality industry (I frequent this site since I did some CS related stuff for my degree years ago but hospitality is my first love).
I got it around the last week of February, before any travel restrictions in Canada. We get (or got) tons of tourists from both Asia and Europe.
Not really, but it's a small town with a young, active population and way more bars per capita than is reasonable. So I hike, ski, go to bars and restaurants, work in hospitality. I would come into close-ish contact with 50+ people per day for sure. Probably more. Tourists and locals come into enough contact too (servers at restaurants, retail workers, etc...).
So Covid was likely floating around here, lots of people I know said they were sick but very few got tested, but our demographics mean that only 1 person died (80+ year old man) and no one else was ever hospitalized.
Also: the Theodore Roosevelt. The captain wouldn't have risked his career for a bunch of sailors with bad flu. But apparently all of the propulsion team was affected to such an extent that they couldn't tend the reactor any longer. It's that bad.
”So much emphasis is placed on the fatality rate, but there’s a lot of middle ground between asymptomatic and dead.“
...and this is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year.
Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines
This is the same middle ground that exists for every other cold and flu, every single year.
Anosmia is a common side effect of a variety of illnesses, and in the vast majority of cases, it resolves on its own. But this fact doesn’t make good headlines.
> “These data demonstrated that the recovered SARS patients had a poor quality of life 12 years following recovery, and were susceptible to inflammation, tumors, and glucose and lipid metabolic disorders,” researchers wrote.
Loss of smell is special because it tends to happen to mild cases more than severe cases.
The idea seems to be that SARS-CoV-2 can infect both the upper and lower respiratory tract. Lower infection attack the lungs and are typically much more severe. Presumably that's what makes SARS classic so deadly. Upper infections are typically milder but spread more easily, that's what the flu and common cold do.
Loss of smell would indicate a upper respiratory tract infection, and therefore a higher chance of generally mild symptoms, more like the flu than SARS.
I don't know what the latest scientific literature has to say about that though, everything is so recent. Loss of smell wasn't even recognized as a symptom 3 months ago...
I wasn’t making a broad comparison to the flu. But if I were, I’d cite the most recent CDC numbers, which put the overall fatality rates somewhere around 3-4x worse than the flu, in the expected case:
Where are you getting the numbers for flu? As far as I'm aware the best guess for flu IFR is 0.04% compared to COVID-19s 0.4% IFR
Note that CDC data on the flu is not on the IFR, they only have an estimate for the symptomatic fatality rate which doesn't include asymptomatic flu cases, while their COVID-19 IFR is including asymptomatic cases too.
(This seems to be because really caring about the true IFR of a virus is a recent development spurred on by this pandemic)
The numbers I cited from the CDC for Covid are symptomatic fatality rates. You can work out an asymptomatic rate by using their estimated percentage of asymptomatic infections, if you like.
> Where are you getting the numbers for flu? As far as I'm aware the best guess for flu IFR is 0.04% compared to COVID-19s 0.4% IFR
Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year, based on statistical extrapolation from seroprevalence surveys. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%:
If you absolutely do not want to rely on CDC numbers, here’s a literature review on the subject which puts the symptomatic IFR at 0.1%, at the extreme high end. Most estimates of symptomatic IFR, according to the review, are between 5-50 / 100k:
There’s clearly a large variance in estimates for the flu at all levels, but no reasonable way to claim a 10x difference in severity for Covid without cherry-picking the worst estimates for it, and the best estimates for influenza.
> The numbers I cited from the CDC for Covid are symptomatic fatality rates.
I guess the CDC are using symptomatic case fatality to mean the IFR then? Or else it doesn't make any sense.
> Any number of different sources; 0.1% is the generally accepted estimate of overall IFR for influenza in an average year. Here’s an article that tries to be as fatalistic as possible, which still cites an overall IFR for flu of 0.1%:
According to their numbers, less than half the "symptomatic cases" resulted in a medical visit. Based on information from their FAQ[1], it seems that column represents the total number of people the CDC estimates got the flu that year:
> How many people get sick with flu every year?
> CDC conducts surveillance for people who see their health care provider for flu-like illness through the Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet); a network of thousands of health care providers who report the proportion of patients seeking care for flu-like illness weekly to CDC. This system allows CDC to track levels of medically attended flu-like illness over the course of the flu season. CDC does not know exactly how many people get sick with seasonal flu each year. There are several reasons for this including that ILINet does not include every health care provider and monitors flu-like illness, not laboratory-confirmed influenza cases. Also, flu illness is not a reportable disease and not everyone who gets sick with flu seeks medical care or gets tested.
> CDC uses mathematical modeling in combination with data from traditional flu surveillance systems to estimate the numbers of flu illnesses in the United States. CDC estimates that flu has resulted in between 9.3 million and 49 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010. For more information on these estimates see CDC’s Disease Burden of Influenza page. For more information on CDC surveillance systems, see CDC’s Overview of Influenza Surviellance in the United States.
The way I read that, from the CDC's POV if you aren't symptomatic you didn't get the flu. Similarly, if you are symptomatic it doesn't necessarily mean you did get the flu.
Given that this disease is killing more people than malaria, while infecting far fewer, I don't think you want to find out just how bad it can get if we don't take strong measures to stop it.
We have no recourse but to put severe restrictions on diseases that exhaust coffins and fill graveyards. That you can compare covid19, the single worst epidemic to hit the world since the Spanish flu with sugar is beyond me.
Nothing we've seen in the West in recent years has killed as many people in as short a timespan as Covid19. Not heart disease, not obesity, not AIDS, nothing. And, again, this is with the restrictions in place. If we didn't have any restrictions, the magnitude would be hard to imagine. Tragically, Brazil will probably show the world what happens if you don't do that.
And as mentioned elsewhere, this whole magnitude was preventable if we really cared. Countries like Vietnam (the most impressive by far), Greece, most of Eastern Europe, SK, Japan show that the right measures can prevent hundreds of thousands of people from dying.
You do know there’s a fundamental difference between something that spreads between people who aren’t symptomatic, and sugar consumption?
I downvoted within 10 seconds because it happened to pop up and I’m tired of this silly false equivalency between a novel pandemic with unknown impact and known diseases with known treatments.
The thing that people don't realise with virus infections is that it can mess you up for a long time, even if it's not lethal. I've had a human parvovirus B19 infection last year(apparently it's incredibly rare in adults, but hey ho), and yeah, I felt like absolute shit for about 2 months, really high fevers, no appetite, basically like a very bad flu that lasted nearly 2 months, but then once it finally went away, I started having massive issues with my joins, widespread inflammation of knees, elbows, shoulders, fingers - like a bad case of arthritis. Was told by rheumatologists that it's a relatively common thing to happen after virus infections, since your own immune system was in high gear after the virus, so now it attacks your own joints instead. Unfortunately it doesn't really have a cure as such, I was given a few steroid injections that settled it down for now but it's still not 100% fine. Or I can go on a long term(1-2 years at least) treatment with methotrexate, but that has a whole lot of its own side effects as well so I'm not very keen.
So yeah, virus infections SUCK, even if they don't kill you.
I had a really bad case of strep-throat a few years back and got a similar auto-immune problem afterwards. Never got a proper diagnosis because I looked okay and put on a show of good spirits when talking. But for two months I couldn't leave the house; if I walked further than the kitchen my ankles and knees would swell so much that I would be moaning on my bed in pain for hours. I felt so lonely and so lost from the world. It took a year before the obvious symptoms really dissapeared (but I could hike again after about 4 months) and I still have trouble maintaining joint and muscle strength in my legs after getting a cold or virus.
Now I can appreciate chronic illness and how isolating it is, even if just a little bit. You can have an amazing support network and still fall through the cracks. I am so glad that I still have my health and try not to take it for granted.
I also had a very rough ride from mono. I was in bed for over a month and came out some very unpleasant side effects. I developed a tic disorder (suspected PANDAS) which has lasted the 6 years since and my immune system was so weak I caught the common cold about once a month for 2 years. Also launched me into depression which took a couple years to climb out of. It is no joke, that's for sure.
We may be entering a new phase of this disease soon. Treatments are coming along.
Stanford is testing interferon-lambda.[1] Known drug, used for treating hepatitis. This has to be given early, within 2 days of testing positive for the virus. A group in the UK is testing interferon-beta.
Eli Lily is testing an engineered antibody.[2] This is new technology, an antibody specifically targeted to this virus. Testing in humans just started; no results yet. Lily is putting this into production in advance of testing, to get the production scaleup problems out of the way, in hope it works.
There are other drugs in development; these are all in human testing now.
Early stage treatment options change things. Advice will change from "stay home until it gets serious" to "get tested and treated as soon as there's any suspicion." Instead of overloaded ICUs, front-line medical care gets overloaded. It really starts to matter than the US doesn't have enough testing capacity.
Hi there, dutch male, just under 60, overall good health, healthy way of living. Halfway march I noticed light Covid related stuff like higher temp (for just 1 day), headache (longer period, not every day), no energy (6 weeks) and then a loss of taste and smell (not very suddenly as I recall). After 7 to 8 weeks taste came back lightly (like smelling toiletcleaner and strong things) and now after a recovery to +- 25% of smell and taste, it is again getting less (10%). And all the time a totally free breathing through the nose. I can taste salt and sweet but for Instance no garlic.
And one other noticable thing, both sides under the back of my tongue feel like they are a bit irritated, lightly swollen salivary glands (for what it is worth).
My mother (73) had Corona in March. She had a throat ache, headache and loss of sense of smell and taste. The symptoms passed after a couple of days but her sense of smell did not come back. Even today, almost 3 months later, it has still not fully recovered.
Well, that truly sucks. COVID-19 is going to cause long term problems for this generation. I'm glad I got over it without issue, but I have to wonder what's in store for my future.
I'll be surprised if over time a few million people in the US don't end up with blood clot related complications from having mild cases of Covid. I suspect the healthcare industrial complex will wave their hands at the notion that Covid caused the damage (they do this with anything inconvenient to their interests, like the millions of people damaged by Cipro, a drug they've handed out like candy to millions of people for decades), it'll largely get buried/lost in the outsized cardiovascular & other health problem numbers in the American population.
I'm not so sure. We're already starting to see people publish studies on how nasty this is an long term issues. This is too big for it to be ignored down the road.
Interestingly, not exactly COVID-19 related, people that lose their sense of taste return to eating normally, but people that lose a sense of feel in their mouth never seem to fully recover their appetite.
I mean, not to say I want to lose my sense of taste, just that losing feel in your mouth seems probably worse.
Yeah, texture is a surprisingly large part of what people enjoy about food. It's honestly weird that we consider it a separate thing from taste, since you take it into account almost as much as flavor when you cook.
I lost half of my tongue senses on a wisdom tooth extraction, it came back slowly during 3 month (its almost 100% back now) but it was terrifying the first week, I just kept thinking If I could live with that, a feeling of depression hit hard
My sense of taste has diminished (a couple of years ago), I think because I had a needle full of anesthetic jabbed into my gumline a few too many times and they hit my nerve once.
I no longer really taste much of anything in the front half of my tongue. Still can in the back half, though. I've gotten used to it, although it annoys me when I think about it. I'm lucky I haven't lost it completely, that would be a sad day.
I think you're right, in that as long as I can feel the food, I could eat alright. Probably would eat a bit healthier, though.
Are there any published statistics on how common that is? I wonder what it inflames or irritates that can't come back after the body recovers from the virus.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Negative placebo effect is real and anosmia (smell blindness) has been making headlines with the 'rona.
To answer the original question: "Postviral olfactory disorders usually occur after an upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) associated with a common cold or influenza. With a prevalence between 11 and 40% they are among the common causes of olfactory disorders."
Slightly offtopic warning. I temporarily lost my sense of smell when I was on a zinc supplement (lozenges). It turned out this is a known effect of zinc lozenges. Zinc supplements should be swallowed immediately. Stay away from nasal sprays that contain zinc.
I lost my sense of smell for about a mo th which was my primary Covid symptom. I think I am now back at least 75% after two months (I was in the early wave of NYC).
I had some flu thing in the beginning of February and I had this weird symptom where anything that contained vinegar (like ketchup) had this terrible acetone-like taste -- I almost brought back the bottle to the store for a refund.
I remeber I was always happy when I lose my sense of taste and smell because of flu, this will help eat more, I don't eat a lot, and my options are limited because of high sense of smell and taste,
That... doesn't sound typical of influenza, to put it mildly.
Blunted senses are the last thing on my mind with persistent nausea, dizziness, sweating buckets, and having to lean on the wall on the way to the kitchen.
I know someone who is in the age range most vulnerable to covid-19 who always says she has no sense of smell, but my impression is it's a long-standing thing, possibly related to allergies or something.
Taste is highly related to smell, and smell is related to congestion symptoms that are typical for respiratory diseases.
Taste and smell loss happens with cold and flu as well, since they are also respiratory diseases: [1]
> The exact mechanism behind post-viral anosmia [smell/taste loss] isn’t yet understood, but it is clear that the various viruses that cause the common cold, including flu, somehow damage and interfere with the olfactory epithelium
Let's not get carried away with the Covid fear hysteria. This is just an example of a risk that already existed that was never on society's collective radar.
Moreover, it's only been a few weeks or months. It's entirely likely that the taste/smell loss is temporary.
The article is literally talking about how loss of taste and smell can profoundly affect someone. It's the exact opposite of "fear hysteria." From the article:
> Out of 417 patients who suffered mild to moderate forms of Covid-19 in Europe, 88% and 86% reported taste and smell dysfunctions, respectively, according to a study published in April in the European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology.
> Most patients said they couldn’t taste or smell even after other symptoms were gone. Preliminary data showed at least a quarter of people regained their ability to taste and smell within two weeks of other symptoms dissipating. The study said long-term data are needed to assess how long this can last in people who didn’t report an improvement.
Right here it is saying that about 25% of patients recover their senses of taste and smell. That means that probably 75% do not. The article spends the entire rest of its word count on explaining the terrible effects this has on those people.
Can you explain to me how that would be considered "hysteria" given how contagious this disease is? That just seems utterly dismissive of these peoples' suffering to me.
Thank you. As someone suffering with this disease long-term (75 days and counting) it's really nice to see someone unaffected speaking the voice of reason and compassion.
Those are much higher rates than I've seen quoted anywhere else. Intuitively, it seems surprising that with almost nine in ten people so affected, I should have been lucky enough not to have any loss of taste or smell at all among my own symptoms, or those of anyone I know who's also had the disease.
I don't doubt for a second the suffering of those affected by anosmia, or that it can be an effect of COVID-19. But I do doubt that the anosmia rate, and especially the rate of anosmia persisting long after other symptoms subside, is as high worldwide as it was in this one quite small cohort.
This statement conflicts sharply with my anecdotal experiences from today. Went to the grocery store, the cashier tells the woman before me that she doesn't believe in the whole thing, its a conspiracy against the people and it needs investigation. I told her that there's more than 300k dead people globaly, you can't deny reality. She asks if I know personally anyone, told her I do, actually know 3 people who were severely seek and one of them died.
From there I went to visit my grandpa, in the hospital, after having a heart attack last week. He is 98. He sees me with the mask, tell me he don't ever follow orders, didn't even follow the Nazis orders. I tell him I wear the mask because I actually believe the situation is dangerous, he looked at me as if I said the weirdest possible thing.
You can't just declare a statement to be "politics" and claim to be above the topic, have it be automatically "uncivil" as if that shuts down a discussion or saves you from evaluating the claim. I'm sorry to say, such an attitude does little to save grandma!
"You're killing grandma!" isn't an attempt to have a discussion. It's at best a primal scream and at worst a bullying tactic - it aims to shut down discussion, to make anyone who disagrees with you look bad.
> Realistically, the US isn't trying to kill their grandmas.
You're delineating intentional acts, and heedless acts with well-known and predictable consequences. That's an important difference in the mind of the actor, but grandma dies either way.
The US has the highest death rate from COVID in the developed world, leaving over 100K dead, a lot of which has been centered in long term care facilities.
As of early May, Taiwan has had 7 total deaths.
Taiwan is what “realistically” not trying to kill your grandmas looks like.
The US is nowhere near the highest death rate in the developed world.
Countries with higher death rates per million people include Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy, France, Sweden, Netherlands, and Ireland.
Also, it seems fishy that you're even using the phrase "in the developed world" because all of the countries that have the highest death rates are developed countries anyway.
Overall, 0/10, do not recommend unless you have to go vegan but don't have any willpower. When my sense of taste gradually returned, I practically cried I was so relieved.