So I had Covid about 4 months ago. Did all the vitamins, minerals, supplements, etc. I got over it in about a week. Wasn't the worst, wasn't the least cold/flu I've ever experienced. FF to about a month ago. My morning commute takes me very close to the shore of the Florida Keys. We had an unusual high tide that seemed to last for a week, or it seemed that the tide lined up to my passing every morning to be very high. Then I drove past low tide, and it was the most intense nastiness I've ever smelled from the ocean.
I asked around at work and got tepid responses. Everyone was "meh" about the smell. Cue the next several days. Suddenly I started smelling that swamp smell everywhere! I take a shit, there it is. I cook bacon, same smell. Beef. Pork. Chicken. I'm now hyper sensitive to the actual swamp smell that I'm the only one who notices it in a group.
The condition I have is called parosmia. I've researched that it can go away if I train my brain to remember what smells are supposed to smell like. Apparently the virus destroys smell receptors in the brain and when they grow back, they don't grow exactly how they used to be.
I'm writing this post for anyone who is suffering from this and thinks they're going crazy like I once thought. I don't think my sense of smell will ever be the same. Luckily for me though, it is not as bad as other people are saying. I can still eat bacon. It's like in the Matrix where the kid is bending the spoon. Don't think that the bacon is sour, instead, think that the bacon is not there at all.
You have a great immune system probobly. I never stopped traveling and going on flights (I fly twice a month) it took me over a year to get it, and thats me hanging out woth people with it. But once I actually got it. It wasn't a big deal but the taste and smell loss and then taste and smell changes are very very annoying.
Think of it this way. There is something spreading that causes very weird symptoms. (Like smelling dead animals when you sniff bacon or flowers, candles, etc.) I give two shits what it actually is, I am giving it a name. Its called Covid.
It’s been long known that the flu can do crazy things with your taste and smell too (article from 1988):
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-02-21-mn-44059-story.html
I have never had the flu do this to me. Plus I could flip your argument and say the flu doesn't exist ots just a cold.
Exactly. No test can identify it, but we “KNOW” we had it cause “muh smell and taste got messed up.”
<eyeroll>
Meanwhile, influenza strains have been monkeying with our olfactory senses for a long time:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-02-21-mn-44059-story.html
Too many people that I know personally to dismiss it to their imaginations. One is a ER nurse who permanently has lost her smell and taste for over a year.
About it being isolated, have you ever considered that maybe they have, but do not want to release the information? (proving lab-made)