My wife and I just came home from vacation, and after 4½ years of avoiding it, we have COVID.
We social distance, usually wear masks in public, and stay up to date on our vaccinations. But all it took was one lady with a mean cough on a two hour flight a week ago to ruin that...or so we think.
The timing really sucks. I had plans for my weekend.
Was in the same boat. Never really went anywhere since 2019 and figured it was ok to start doing professional related travel. Went to a conf in Vegas late August and came down with it the day I got back. Fuck traveling from now on.
After my ability to smell and taste were completely gone for 2 months I got bummed out enough to try smell training. I didn't buy the expensive kits, but did find strongly scented aromatherapy wax sticks that I sniff every day. If nothing else, going from "these all smell like nothing" to "oh that IS lemongrass or ginger" definitely brightened my mood. It's been 6 months now and I still can't taste tomato or smell lavender, but can now easily detect things like nail polish remover and eucalyptus oil. It's weird to take a strong whiff of rubbing alcohol and not notice a single thing. Good luck!
Oh wow - I got lucky then. It was a week of everything tasting like metal at first. It's still there now but like "at the edges" of the tongue if that makes any sense. There's a patch in the middle that's able to pick out ingredients / attributes well enough to enjoy some things again.
Hopefully you get your taste back fully in the coming months. I had COVID the first year in October, and it kicked my ass real good. It took a few months for mine to come back to what seems fully.
Is it still the case that not your smelling receptors are impaired, but that the virus crosses the blood-brain barrier and destroys/knocks out the brain region responsible for smelling.
That's not exactly true. While the vaccines don't prevent infection in all cases, they do significantly lower your chance of becoming infected when you're exposed to someone with COVID.
Unfortunately masks are most effective when the person with COVID wears them, rather than people who are trying to avoid COVID, but human nature is such that people with COVID (ones who go out in public) are often ones least worried about it so least likely to wear a mask in the first place.
I had a similar experience where I went to a conference and masked up religiously around groups only to catch it anyway while my colleagues didn't mask and didn't catch it.
Sometimes you can do everything right and still fail (paraphrasing Picard).
After so many years you are still wearing covid masks and doing tests? For me the last time I wore a mask was almost two years ago, and only because I visited another country where it was still mandatory.