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Tracy Messina knew something was wrong the day she couldn't smell her tea. She asked her husband, Marcus, to make a cup of apple cinnamon, but when he brought it over, she couldn't pick up any of the usual scents. "I thought maybe he made me chamomile, which had no smell," Messina tells PS.

"He's like, 'No, it's apple cinnamon.'" In a panic, she asked him to grab her an Oreo, but when she bit down, she detected none of the typical chocolate flavor. That's how she realized that her taste and smell were both completely gone.



At the height of the pandemic, loss of smell was known to be a common sign of COVID-19. "If we think about four years ago, 70 percent of people lost their sense of smell [due to COVID]," says Valentina Parma, PhD. But according to a 2023 study from Mass Eye and Ear in Boston , about 21 percent of people with this particular symptom, known as anosmia, experienced only partial recovery, and about 3 percent never recovered any of their sense of smell.

That means "we have millions of people that, over the last four years, have lost their sense of smell and taste, and a portion of them lost it permanently," confirms Dr. Parma. She believes as many as 5 to 10 percent of people may still be dealing with complete anosmia as a result of COVID.

Valentina Parma , phD, is a psychologist, chair of the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research, and assistant director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center. She is currently researching how smell, taste, and chemesthesis a.

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