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.
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.
Anecdotal appeals aren’t good grounds for establishing the existence of a “Novel” virus that has only been identified in silico.
frankly i don't care lol. you believe what you want dude. the thing i got is my own experience. and from my own perspective this is very different and i guess you wont ever believe it until you experience something similar.
Some would agree with your hypothetical statement of the flu never existing. They would even go as far as saying NO virus has ever been isolated. They have pretty good arguments. Have you looked into that position at all?
Yup. i've looked into it. but its incredibly difficult to disprove a negative. for example (prove this isn't a simulation we live in, or prove to me that you aren't the FBI). we can see "dead" viruses but they are so small that its nearly impossible to see them without "killing" them. regardless of what a virus is, one thing is easily provable. If you take a substrate containing the crap we call a virus, and inject it into a person or animal. the animals all exhibit similar symptoms. and after they get over it, injecting them each subsequent time appears to be more milder. So something is happening from the stuff, and there is some form of tolerance that forms after infection is over. Call it what you want. i will call it the name "virus" and call the tolerance "immunity" but if others want to dive into everything in the world is fake and they wanna call it something else, i dont care. we have to do the same thing in the end anyways. pit the right stuff in our body, try to keep the bad stuff out, and live out life. what we call it doesnt matter at all to me.