Two-thirds of up to 80% of people that have had COVID-19 may have to live with this symptom for many months to a lifetime.
The list of COVID-19 symptoms is quite long and now recovered patients are reporting suffering from symptoms weeks to months after the infection has passed.
A report from Fox2Now reveals that some recovered COVID-19 patients are suffering from a condition called parosmia, which is a condition that distorts the patient’s sense of smell.
According to Danielle Meskunas, who has an 11-year-old daughter named Lorelai that caught COVID-19 back in November, “She could smell a little bit, but things didn’t smell like she thought they should. She was basically saying things smelled like rotten food, like something that had been sitting in the fridge.”
Danielle took her daughter to go and see her primary care doctor, and he said that she has parosmia, “Thankfully our primary care doctor had heard of parosmia, and he said, ‘I think this is what this is…’. He told us this is essentially nerve damage due to COVID and there wasn’t a lot we could do. This condition can go on for months, on the bottom end of it, or it could last forever.”
Dr. Thomas Gallaher, a medical director of infectious diseases and infection prevention, talked to Nexstar affiliate 9OYS and said that “Two-thirds of up to 80% of people [with COVID] will lose their taste or smell, but it will eventually go away. Most people do get better, but some have this long COVID.”
Gallaher goes on to say that he has seen more patients come in reporting this same condition. Unfortunately, as Gallaher says, researchers don’t know enough about the condition to provide adequate treatment. However, now that more people are recovering from the virus and vaccines are being distributed, researchers will now pivot towards finding out treatments for these acute symptoms.