When Scott Van Pelt announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19 on December 17, he said that he thankfully had no fever but was experiencing another symptom that led to him getting the test in the first place: a loss of smell and taste.
Three months later, nothing has changed. He's still extremely grateful that he didn't have a fever or any serious symptoms of coronavirus that have led to much more severe cases around the globe. And he still can't taste.
"I never felt bad... [but] I still can't taste, not much, which is a horror show," Van Pelt told Jimmy Traina on the latest episode of the "Sports Illustrated Media Podcast" released on Wednesday. "I couldn't taste an apple one day, and it was like, oh man. And... my back was achey and all of a sudden I couldn't taste and I'm like, oh no, and I went and got a rapid test."
SVP received a positive result soon after, isolated at a family house in Delaware, and waited for time to pass. He obviously has since gone back on the air and is no longer actively contagious, dodging any fever or cough, but the absence of smell and taste has lingered.
"It's awful, because the one thing that still tastes the same to me even now, that's peanut M&M's, so I just eat peanut M&M's because it's the one thing that tastes correct," Van Pelt said. "All these weird things like these savory pastas with beautiful tomato and onion and whatever that should have this flavor, I don't get it. I don't get that flavor."
He's tried everything, even the TikTok strategy of eating burnt oranges — yes, that's really a thing, though it doesn't work — but to no avail.
"It's not great. Eating is one of the pleasures of life and I mean, I'm kind of a creature of habit, I eat a lot of the same things," Van Pelt said. "Like, strawberries, I kind of have that flavor so that's good, I eat a lot of strawberries.
"...It's just so strange and, I mean, it's been three months plus where I haven't been able to really taste... and I wake up every morning and I shove the bar of soap up my nose to see, like, can I smell today? Nope."
"...I'm kind of laughing about this, but I'm grateful that that's what it was. I mean there are people that lose the ability to breathe, you know. I didn't lose that ability and, to me, it was as mild as it could possibly be other than this odd, lingering annoyance."
Unfortunately, it seems as though the annoyance has lasted longer for Van Pelt than the majority of people who experience this symptom. The median reported duration of loss of smell or taste was eight days in a report from the CDC, and for 98 percent of people in a small study from Europe, symptoms of anosmia were gone in 28 days (via Jill Seladi-Schulman of Healthline.com).
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