Hacker News Reader

I lost my sense of smell from a minor virus I caught a couple years ago. It probably wasn't COVID (I tested negative at least).

It came back very slowly, and unevenly. My coffee/chocolate taste is still quite dim.

Of all the possible smells to lose, why did it have to be those?

View on HN

Hard to say without more info but most at-home COVID tests have a very high false negative rate due to the virus mutating and generally how the test is designed.

It's also the case that respiratory viruses predating covid often cause temporary loss of smell, it just wasn't much in the public consciousness before covid

Definitely possible, I lost my sense of smell completely for a couple of months over a decade ago after a minor cold. Completely gone, could not even smell gasoline. It was pretty upsetting. One day it was a faint scent of peanut butter that came back, and a few days later it recovered completely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com