I am not 100% sure I had it in Dec 2019 because there's no way I'm willingly getting in any test queue. But I had all the symptoms except excessive cough, and the smell and taste loss were definitely real. I ruined a lot of meals, at the time I attributed it to being too weak to stand around watching it cook, plus not really wanting to eat what tasted like cardboard at best. This is before anyone outside China knew about it, so suggestion was not at work. I understood the real problem after I started to feel better and experienced fitful bursts of extreme fragrance. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that an URI would affect the olfactory nerve--colds and sinus infections do. Another possibility is that this virus affects the nervous system more than we know, but unpredictably like Guillian-Barre syndrome. That said, I've noticed many people don't have a very good sense of smell normally and symptom lists do make them aware.

Like placebo? Placebo is one hell of a drug