Sunday Rerun (from 2020): At least we learned something

 We can't seem to escape one thing: every horrible event, such as this current pandemic, adds to our vocabulary.

It's not a new word; certainly it was known to doctors and other medical professionals, but we all know now that the technical term for "losing the sense of smell" is "anosmia."  We used to just call it "can't smell nothin' " but now we know better.  It's pronounced uhNAHZmeea, not uhNOSEmia, by the way.  I checked!

Holly Bourne is a woman from London who says anosmia is "one of the most upsetting things (she's) ever gone through. I woke up and couldn't taste or smell anything. It was the most acute thing I've ever experienced."

She did not have the cough or high fever, but when she was cooking one day with her back to the stove and failed to notice the scent of a plastic margarine tub on the stovetop until her boyfriend alerted her, she noticed she couldn't smell a thing, and called her doctor, who said he was able to diagnose her "straight off the bat" with Covid-19 over the phone.

This novel coronavirus is all new  - hence the "novel" characterization - and so there have been no studies yet on the link between coronavirus and sense of smell or taste, but the reports of it among people with the COVID-19 are so numerous as to make it seem unlikely to be coincidental.

And there's also a condition known as hyposmia, or partial loss of the sense of smell. I was planning to call it Anosmia, Jr or Anosmia Lite, but hyposmia it shall be.

But how long will it last?  That's unknown, according to Professor Steven Munger, Director of the University of Florida's Center for Smell and Taste.


"What we've known for a long time is one of the major causes of smell loss are upper respiratory tract infections due to viruses -- a common cold, influenza -- a subset of people lose their sense of smell, most of them temporarily, but a small subset lose that smell permanently," Munger told CNN.

Munger adds that there is "a real emotional component to smell, a connectedness that comes with it" and that gets into how our social connections are involved with food or drink. Even beyond the angle of safety - not noticing the smell of fire or that of spoiled food - that social aspect is important, especially as we look forward to getting together with friends and family after the pandemic is over.

There's every reason to believe that senses of taste and smell will return as soon as the malls reopen.  That's either a good or bad thing, depending.