“The smell of onions is everywhere”: how people with post-COVID loss of smell live

Harvard physicians decided to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on olfactory and gustatory functions in US adults. To do this, we analyzed data from the National Health Inventory of Americans regarding COVID-19 diagnoses, testing and severity of the disease, as well as data that quantifies the impairment and subsequent recovery of smell and taste.

In 2021, 35.8 million or 14% of US adults were diagnosed with COVID-19. Among them, 60.5% reported a concomitant loss of smell or taste, respectively, there was a significant association between the overall severity of COVID-19 symptoms and impaired smell and taste.

After infection, 72.2%, 24.1%, and 3.7% of patients experienced complete recovery, partial recovery, and no recovery of smell, respectively. Recovery rates for gustatory function were similar to those for olfaction: 76.8%, 20.6%, and 2.6 patients reported complete recovery, partial recovery, and no taste recovery at all. Some patients said they lost their appetite because they couldn’t smell the food. They expressed concerns about losing their ability to smell gas, smoke, spoiled food, and dirty diapers.

Of course, the Americans are not alone – among the Russians, too, a huge army of patients has formed who are faced with the loss of olfactory and gustatory sensations. The MK reviewer found a lot of stories in patient communities.

Here is what the spouses Ekaterina and Oleg say: having been ill back in April 2020, she still does not feel many smells, mostly unpleasant, while her husband began to feel much more acutely. “It’s just a punishment, I can’t get rid of obsessive odors, they haunt both at home and on the street. I tortured my wife with the fact that I constantly demand to throw out certain products from the refrigerator: I always think that they are spoiled!

Many people who have been ill with covid note that after a year or two, the smells do not return completely, or do not return at all. “Time is the best doctor, as it turned out. Everything came back 2 years later. I didn’t take any pills for all the time, I was sick several times. Yes, emotions suffer when the sense of smell is disturbed, it’s true. But orchids don’t smell like that, ”writes Galina. “Just stop paying attention to it – slowly everything will return. The smells and tastes disappeared in January 2021, now almost everything has returned, except for changes in the smells of coffee, sweat and, sorry, feces. There was a complete absence, and distortion, and the apparent smells of cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, and the whole food stank of God knows what. Tried to treat – to no avail. And then she just gave up on everything. The result is positive. Before covid, she was a “sniffer”, the scent was excellent,” Elena shares her experience. “There was no smell for a year. Then they partly returned. And it was terrible: like most bespectacled people, my sense of smell was heightened all my life, it was hard to go without smells. Now there are periodic distortions, something smells, something doesn’t smell, and something smells, but not at all,” says Olga.

Here are some more patient stories.

“The smells returned after half a year, but some are still disgusting, some are still distorted, for a year now, everything stinks of smelly meat and feces.”

“I have been odorless for 7 months. But then I started hearing chlorine. And as soon as even a little stress, everything completely disappears again.

“Some say those who had adenoids removed in childhood are now suffering. I don’t know, but I’m sad. There was even a complex: does my armpits smell? And then my memory wasn’t very good: I forget if I used deodorant.”

“More than a year of problems with smell. I enjoy every scent. I live in the “it smells today – tomorrow it’s not a fact” mode.

“For two years there are no smells or tastes. And, as I understood, for myself, emotions are very closely connected with the sense of smell. That is, they also do not exist, such as they were before.

“Smells and tastes were completely absent for about a month and a half, then they began to return gradually, and after 2 months they were distorted, one might say, I didn’t have time to feel normal smells. I don’t know if it will ever recover. Meat, onions, fish, sweat, garlic – everything stinks disgustingly.

“For a year now I have neither taste nor smell, now smells have been added – hallucinations, but I’m used to it. The key is patience.”

“The bitter, nasty, strange smell of onions is now heard in everything and everywhere. So I smell like onions, eggs, coffee, vitamins – the same type of unfamiliar bitter smell. Terribly annoying, I don’t understand what’s going on. After all, everything is just beginning to recover slowly … “

Patients share life hacks, sometimes incredible — how to return the situation back to normal. However, there are no universal methods. One of the most popular methods (quite a medical one) is daily training to inhale strong odors (coffee, perfume, etc.). However, no guarantees that this will help, no one will give. Someone helps inhalation with lidocaine. One patient says that she was helped by an almost witchcraft ritual: setting fire to the peel of garlic and sniffing the smoke. Evidence-based medicine is shrugging it off…

…Doctors note that it is still not entirely clear why the loss of smell occurs. One of the versions is that the SarsCov2 virus does not damage olfactory receptors, but the supporting cells that surround these receptors. At the same time, anosmia (complete loss of odors), hyposmia (partial impairment of smell), perversions of smell are distinguished. What pleases: most often the process is reversible. Sometimes it takes months or even years to recover. It is suggested that the virus affects the olfactory tract throughout its entire length: that is, the olfactory nerve, and the bulb, and part of the brain. How deeply the virus penetrates the central nervous system and how deeply it damages is an open question.

Doctors advise that if you lose your sense of smell for longer than two months, use medication methods. Among them: special drugs, acetylcholinesterase blockers, which are prescribed for lesions of all peripheral nerves. Physiotherapy is sometimes used (for example, translingual neurostimulation, a method commonly used to rehabilitate patients with Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, and after a stroke). Well, or the method of training the sense of smell by inhaling bright odors.

But so far, reliable methods of treatment, alas, have not been invented.