According to a new study, nearly 90% of people who lose their sense of smell and taste due to coronavirus infection recover within a month.
According to the Italian doctors, 49% of the patients have fully recovered their sense of smell or taste, while 40% have not fully recovered their sense of smell or taste but have improved it. In 10% of the patients, however, the symptoms did not change or even worsened.
Given the scale of the current pandemic, experts warn that these consequences could be long-term for many thousands of people. Changes in the sense of taste and smell or their complete loss are recognized as one of the main symptoms of coronavirus.
Doctors from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) recommend that anyone experiencing such symptoms should isolate themselves and their family members and undergo a coronavirus test.
An international group of physicians studied the course of disease in 187 Italians with a relatively mild coronavirus infection that did not require hospitalization. They were asked to rate their sense of smell immediately after being diagnosed with Covid-19 and then one month later.
A change in taste or smell was reported by 113 people: We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what happens next. The episodes. End of story: Podcast Advertising. People with more severe symptoms took longer to recover.
Dr. Claire Hopkins, President of the British Society of Rhinology, who was part of this research group, reported that her team is currently investigating how people who have had symptoms of the disease for a long time feel. “Observations of other viral diseases, as well as new data that we continue to collect, provide a basis for suggesting that the majority of people recover quickly, but for some this process may be prolonged,” she commented in an interview with the BBC. “Those who recover quickly from coronavirus are more likely to have only the cells of the nasal mucosa affected. For those who recover more slowly, it is possible that this virus affects the nerve endings involved in the sense of smell. And those nerve cells take longer to recover and regenerate,” says Claire Hopkins.
Data from these studies were published in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery. As Joshua Levy of Emory University writes in the same publication, “Even allowing for the high percentage of full recoveries, the overwhelming number of people affected by this pandemic suggests with a high degree of certainty that we will be inundated with patients with persistent symptoms. He also notes that, unfortunately, there is little they can do to help them.