The Sniff Test

The news of a chewing gum that restores taste and smell years after Covid (via Mefi) was so good to see. It does echo some folk advice from the height of the pandemic, to inhale strong smells like coffee while recovering from anosmia, in order to reestablish those neural connections. I followed that advice myself. Like many people, I had my senses of smell and taste knocked out for a while by my first full-blown Covid infection in 2021; not being able to taste anything was awful. I didn’t experience as much of it during my second full-blown infection in 2023 and third in 2025, but by those I’d had two silent infections in 2022 (testing positive without strong symptoms) which left me… not quite right. It felt like I had some kind of long Covid from them, but I couldn’t really tell if my fatigue and headaches were because of other stresses I was dealing with. One of the symptoms, though, was parosmia, phantom smells (of something burnt, in my case), which seemed as if it had to be from…