A popular media narrative has arisen, claiming that COVID poses some unique health risks that weren't already facts of life to some degree. This is then used for justifying endless interventions, re-arranging our whole lives around this one new illness.
This can cause panic among the psychologically vulnerable population, causing the very symptoms that are now attributed to "long COVID". I wouldn't phrase it quite as polemically as my flagged cousin, but there is truth to what they are saying.
> You seem to be working from a position of motivated reasoning, so I'm going to opt out of trying to convince you.
I don't even know what you would want convince me of. We probably agree for the most part. Sars-CoV2 isn't Influenza and (in aggregate) it is more dangerous than Influenza. It made everyday life riskier.
We may or may not agree on what an appropriate response to this new risk is. Either way, we both are susceptible to motivated reasoning. That shouldn't prevent us from having a conversation.
Losing your sense of smell, even permanently, is a known side-effect of Influenza infection:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23948436/
The same is true for many inflammatory conditions, such as myocarditis.
As for diffuse symptoms that are most likely psychosomatic: Look into ME/CFS. These are patients which may have a very real perception of debilitating symptoms that have no tangible underlying physical cause. There's a lot of misguided activism surrounding the topic, because people don't want to be perceived as having a mental disorder, due to the associated stigma.