Lack of scent, sudden and complete, is looking to be a likely candidate for a definitive symptom of the Covid19 infection .
A Bloomberg columnist has compiled an interesting review of the symptoms commonly associated with the coronavirus infection here.
Michael Lewis writes: [..] “a lot more people than we know — even 80-year-old people — have had the virus but never got sick enough to get themselves tested. That’s what’s so interesting about the simple, one-page letter written last week by two British doctors. Claire Hopkins and Nirmal Kumar, among the country’s most prominent ear, nose and throat specialists, had both noticed the same odd symptom in their coronavirus patients: a loss of the sense of smell. “Anosmia,” it is called, but I suppose they have to call it something.”
While a great deal of patients show some terrible signs indicating a positive result for a coronavirus test, a great deal many do not. As such, many people walk around with the disease but without great deal of symptoms, with ‘Anosmia’ as the sole distinction between themselves with the infection and without it.
More testing, diagnosis and data overall is needed to positively correlate the cover-19 infection with a lack of smell, but because of the lack of testing, the consistency with this one signal correlating at .8 with positive infection rates is startling.