With COVID-19 hospitalizations up more than 12% in the last week, per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’s again time to pay closer attention to symptoms often brushed off as “just a cold.”
However, one of the hallmark symptoms that set COVID-19 apart from other viral infections – loss of smell, or chemosensory loss – may not be a reliable indicator anymore, according to a recent study.
“In the past, people were quite aware, if they had a cold and they lost their sense of smell, that they potentially had COVID. Whereas now, you really can’t tell,” said Dr. Evan Reiter, medical director of VCU Health’s Smell and Taste Disorders Center, according to a Tuesday CBS News article.
Reiter is the lead author of the research, which was published this May in the journal Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery. He explained that loss of smell was a vital symptom used in COVID-19 diagnoses during the early stages of the pandemic, before testing was widely available.
“These data suggest that during the recent omicron waves and potentially moving forward, the presence or absence of smell and taste disturbances may no longer have predictive value in the diagnosis of COVID-19 infection,” the study concluded. Researchers used information from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative database, with data from more than 7 million patients.
Amidst the omicron wave last year and this year, “the risk of smell loss from infection was as low as 6% compared with 2020 rates,” said the study. According to the most recent CDC data, nearly all of the circulating COVID-19 strains are variants of omicron.
“We don’t have the data on what’s causing this decline in smell loss as a symptom of COVID-19, but I would speculate that this might be related to our increased immunity to the virus, either through vaccines or having an earlier infection, as this typically helps reduce the severity of future infections,” Reiter said, according to a Virginia Commonwealth University press release.
Reiter and his colleagues plan to continue researching potential treatments for those still affected by smell loss from COVID-19.
Dr. Daniel Coelho, a professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at the University and Dr. Richard Costanzo, a professor emeritus in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics are leading a team of researchers focused on developing an implant device to restore sense of smell. Previous research from Reiter, Coelho and Costanzo found that 54% of the people who experienced COVID-19 related smell loss had only partially recovered their sense of smell.
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