Brooke Viegut, a 25-year-old living in Washington Heights, first noticed something was off when she stepped inside her partner’s building last June.
“We walked in the front door, and the whole building smelled rancid,” she says, describing the smell as “rotten, burned meat slash flesh.” Her partner didn’t notice anything except a few whiffs of the neighbor’s cooking.
Viegut, like many afflicted by COVID-19, had lost her sense of smell when she got the coronavirus last March. This anosmia, as it is called, persisted for much longer than her run-of-the-mill symptoms, which dissipated after two to three weeks. At first, her smell perception came back muted. Then, scents that were once pleasant—or at least tolerable—started to smell so bad they made her stomach turn.
She eventually learned that she had a condition known as parosmia, or a distorted sense of smell. Cooking oil was one of her triggers. “There’s a bodega that makes a lot of fried food right next to my apartment, and I have to go the long way,” she says. “Chinese food as a whole is a no-go. Pizza is a solid no-go.”
Chrissi Kelly founded AbScent after she came down with a sinus infection in 2012 that precipitated anosmia and subsequent parosmia. She says the disorder has gained increased attention among the general public and researchers since COVID’19’s arrival. She has surveyed people with parosmia and monitored their discussions online, and says she has noticed some common threads.
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