Well, imagine that instead of just having a continuous “smell survey” of your surroundings, you get bits and pieces. A waft here, a whiff there, despite that what you’re cooking usually fills the whole house with the smell of garlic and butter. Like, I’ll go “ooh, I smell garlic” and then realize “well, duh, I’m standing over a pan full of it.”

And I just can’t smell certain things. Like bleach - at all. I used to use bleach solutions for sanitizing my homebrew equipment, but I had to switch to one of those fancy sanitizers that breaks down to vinegar because I couldn’t smell when the bottles had been rinsed enough.

The most frustrating thing (aside not being able to quickly assess whether your pets cages are clean) is not being able to detect potentially dodgy food. I can stick my nose into a container, and aside from a vague odor of the contents most basic scent, it’s not really specific enough to tell if it smelled “off” or not.

This varies day to day, and breathing steam helps, but it’s definitely not back yet after almost a year.

Damn.

Yeah. Mask up, people. I got lucky, comparatively speaking. As a woodwind player I am exceptionally lucky I didn't lose more.

it's fascinating to look at the variation in how the disease has affected different countries

Sure I'm not the only one who's noted this topic's a classic example of thread drift!

Sure I'm not the only one who's noted this topic's a classic example of thread drift!

We're in our third lockdown since before chirstmas. There was a brief respite before that but the new more virulent strain of the virus from the UK has become the dominant strain and lockdown is to continue for at least another month. If anything, things seem to become harder as time goes on.

I know you have some of the new variants there too but I am not sure to what extend, but be prepared to see things worsen when they become the more prevalent strains. Some of the vaccines appear less effective against some of the new strains, particularly the South African and South American ones.

It'll be a while before we see the end of all this.