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Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

wsj.com

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Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#171

Post by macintux »

5ociety wrote: post #169
tsimionescu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do get the fallacy here right? You can say that about anything. Shouldn't we also put severe restrictions on sugar consumption since that kills more people than malaria and covid19 combined? You can use your argument about literally anything that kills people and has a greater than 0 chance of happening. Have you looked at any statistics yourself aside from reading articles? What would be an acceptable death rate…

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.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#172

Post by DanBC »

5ociety wrote: post #169
tsimionescu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do get the fallacy here right? You can say that about anything. Shouldn't we also put severe restrictions on sugar consumption since that kills more people than malaria and covid19 combined? You can use your argument about literally anything that kills people and has a greater than 0 chance of happening. Have you looked at any statistics yourself aside from reading articles? What would be an acceptable death rate…

People cannot downvote replies to their comments, so the downvote didn't come from tsimionescu.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#173

Post by jansan »

hwillis wrote: post #158
jansan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then this was definitely not caused by congestion. Would be really interesting to know what was going on with your senses at that time.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#174

Post by Tagbert »

jryan49 wrote: post #130
disillusioned wrote: post #93

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…

Same exact thing happened to me. I had a negative antibody test.

If you were to take another antibody test, I bet you would test positive. They are proving to be somewhat unreliable.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#175

Post by 5ociety »

macintux wrote: post #171
5ociety wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do get the fallacy here right? You can say that about anything. Shouldn't we also put severe restrictions on sugar consumption since that kills more people than malaria and covid19 combined? You can use your argument about literally anything that kills people and has a greater than 0 chance of happening. Have you looked at any statistics yourself aside from reading articles? What would be an acceptable death rate…

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.

Wrong. You downvoted because you downvote all things you don't already agree with. I would be surprised if you didn't also downvote opposing political views. You downvote things. That is how you make a difference in the world, by downvoting things.

You should downvote yourself because you've decided to argue a different point for internet points. Lots of preventable things kill people.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#176

Post by Mikeb85 »

azinman2 wrote: post #168
Mikeb85 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you feel like you had prolonged exposure to someone at a close distance?

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.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#177

Post by AnimalMuppet »

sparkywolf wrote: post #132
disillusioned wrote: post #93

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…

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...

You're going to love what it does to your sense of taste. The problem is, you're likely to gain weight as well.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#178

Post by tsimionescu »

5ociety wrote: post #169
tsimionescu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do get the fallacy here right? You can say that about anything. Shouldn't we also put severe restrictions on sugar consumption since that kills more people than malaria and covid19 combined? You can use your argument about literally anything that kills people and has a greater than 0 chance of happening. Have you looked at any statistics yourself aside from reading articles? What would be an acceptable death rate…

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.

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#179

Post by eluusive »

Okay... so? This is a symptom of many viruses. My sister got Bell's Palsy from the flu a couple months ago and still hasn't recovered.

What are the relative rates of these issues with nCoV-19 over Rhinovirus, normal Coronavirus, and Flu A/B?

Any neurotropic virus can cause this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosmia#List_of_causes

Examples of such viruses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotropic_virus#Examples

Influenza

Re: Some coronavirus patients haven't gotten their senses of smell or taste back yet

#180

Post by arcticbull »

abiogenesis wrote: post #61
arcticbull wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of ICU patients isn't even close to 50% of infected though, so it's important to keep that in mind.

Did 50% of infected lose their sense of smell or taste?

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]

[1] https://www.raleighcapitolent.com/blog/lost-sense-of-smell?e...

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