It was the juice that tipped him off. At lunch, Ícaro de A.T. Pires found the flavor of his grape juice muted, flattened into just water with sugar. There was no grape goodness. “I stopped eating lunch and went to the bathroom to try to smell the toothpaste and shampoo,” says Pires, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Hospital IPO in Curitiba, Brazil. “I realized then that I couldn’t smell anything.”
Pires was about three days into COVID-19 symptoms when his sense of smell vanished, an absence that left a mark on his days. On a trip to the beach two months later, he couldn’t smell the sea. “This was always a smell that brought me good memories and sensations,” Pires says. “The fact that I didn’t feel it made me realize how many things in my day weren’t as fun as before. Smell can connect to our emotions like no other sense can.”
As SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, ripped across the globe, it stole the sense of smell away from millions of people, leaving them with a condition called anosmia. Early in the pandemic, when Pires’ juice turned to water, that olfactory theft became one of the quickest ways to signal a COVID-19 infection. With time, most people who lost smell recover the sense. Pires, for one, has slowly regained a large part of his sense of smell. But that’s not the case for everyone.
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