> Anybody who lost their sense of taste or smell took months to recover that. Loss of smell or taste is almost 50% for Covid prior to Omicron. Even with Omicron, it's about 20%.

And yet, in more anecdata, everyone I know who had taste issues recovered them in much less than a month with no long-term impacts.

My mom got her taste back in about 2 weeks.

I lost my sense of smell and taste which was really upsetting, but got it back in about 11 days. No lingering issues either.

I’ve recovered my sense of sense and test within a week after the first onset of symptoms.

Just throwing on the pile of anecdotes, almost everybody I know has had Covid at least once and I can only think of a couple that lost any sense of taste or smell beyond the few days they were sick. I do know one guy though who says he still can't smell many things. Not sure if it's from Covid or not since he was vaccinated. Then again, now we know Pfizer never bothered to test if the vaccine actually stopped transmission, so who knows. [1]

I guess the point is anecdotes are worthless.

[1] https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/human-body/pfizer...

I lost the sense of smell only the first time I had Covid. What’s curious to me is that that symptom has occurred in me several times before caused by influenza or similar, long before Covid, although not as prolonged (slowly recovering after Covid in about a month). I may be an outlier but I’ve never seen or heard anyone else mention this.