The other times, I had no loss of taste or smell. I do wonder why it only impacted me the first time. Different Covid variant, or something biologically changed in me, causing it to impact me differently?
The second time I contracted COVID, it was mostly just a miserable fever but I lost my smell and taste, and they still have not come back completely almost a year later.
My theory is that COVID does a random walk when eating away the brain from wherever it enters.
https://www.cnet.com/science/scientists-say-mammals-can-brea...
I was so excited I ended up eating half the bag, lol.
If I understand correctly, at that time, only a tiny slice of the population had been exposed to previous COVID variants, and something like 80% has since gotten it. It looks like the vaccination rate was something like 90% at the time, but that should still be a pretty large naive population to look at, of people who were exposed to Omicron & later with no original/Delta exposure.
As far as I know, I haven't had it since, but did get the vaccinations. Do you (does anyone here) know if there is a test to see if you did have it, or does the vaccine response swamp that signal?
However, antibodies decrease with time. (We have memory T-cells etc for long term immunity). Whilst I am not an expert, I would be very surprised if virtual induced antibodies were still detectable.
What you describe: it is very possible you had COVID, but it is also very possible you had a bad flu. There are other viruses too, like RSV, which used to be rarely mentioned, but at times can be nasty.
In contrast this test does not distinguish between virus and vaccine as the cause: <https://onlinedoctor.superdrug.com/coronavirus-antibody-test...>.
I don't have a better approach than checking the descriptions of individual antibody tests. But I know the distinction is real, because IIRC the ONS (statistics body) used tests which distinguished, when they ran their ongoing study.
Edited: to be clear we both thought prior to the antibody test that it was covid!
Probably not, there were nasty flu strains circulating then that are much more likely an explanation. It had already spread somewhat, but not enough to be a likely cause until March even in the areas with early outbreaks like Italy and NYC etc. Exponential growth means that not long before everyone has it, the vast majority don’t have it.
You could say the zinc cured your sense of smell.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7781367/
There have also been multiple reports linking the loss of taste or smell to zinc deficiency, either due to chemotherapy and metal chelating agents [38–40], or due to nutritional deficiencies, especially in older populations [41,42], also caused by medical procedures such as dialysis [43]. As a result, zinc has been proposed in the treatment of taste disorders [44,45]; however, zinc supplementation for chemotherapy-induced loss of smell or taste, which is often transient, has not led to improvements in this condition