[electricviolet]

Does this not happen to most people with regular colds?

For at least the past 5-10 years, I've noticed that whenever I get more than a very mild cold, I completely lose my sense of smell for a few days. (I'm talking 100% loss, like holding bananas under my nose and inhaling and smelling nothing.)

I thought that was normal, but everyone making such a big deal out of the loss of smell makes me wonder if I'm unusual for experiencing it with regular colds.

[chadash]

Yeah, I think that's unusual. I assume most people lose their smell a bit when their nose gets stuffy, but complete loss... no.

[rsynnott]

It happens to some people, but it does seem to be more common with covid.

[drummer]

> I thought that was normal, but everyone making such a big deal out of the loss of smell makes me wonder if I'm unusual for experiencing it with regular colds.

It was normal until people started to extremely exaggerate what covid-19 really is to make it seem a lot more dangerous when in fact it is just like influenza.

[Ancapistani]

I can’t downvote yet on this account, so I’ll just comment instead: the truth is almost certainly in the middle.

COVID-19 isn’t a death sentence, it it’s also not “just the flu”. It’s not even related to the flu, and it shares only a subset of symptoms. It’s also got a significantly higher mortality rate and different R0, - it seems to spread more readily and it’s therefore reasonable to believe through slightly different means,

There’s growing evidence that there is a much larger proportion of people who acquire it and develop either no or very minimal symptoms. It’s not at all clear yet if those people shed enough virus particles to be a significant transmission vector.

So, yeah - for many people, COVID-19 is “just the flu” or even “just a runny nose”. We just don’t know how many people are going to react that way, why, who they will be, or what impact they may have in friends and family.

Discounting it as you seem to be is a recipe for unnecessary deaths. Overestimating it is as well.

[dustinmoris]

> Discounting it as you seem to be is a recipe for unnecessary deaths. Overestimating it is as well.

I would agree with this but enough time has passed that we have enough numbers to confirm that the vast majority of healthy (with a small theoretical chance of outliers) will shake COVID off even easier than influenza. ICU beds in all countries were filled predominantly by very obese people or end of life patients with serious health conditions. Basically stop being fat or at least don’t make your unhealthy eating habits the problem of healthy people. At this point it’s clear that we are destroying young lives to protect some people who don’t want to deal with the consequences of their own life choices. There is no way we can protect people without harming others with this virus. So if we have to choose who has to suffer then surely it’s more ethical to let people pick up their own bill rather than punishing people who are innocent and not even in danger. We put people in danger who shouldn’t be in danger. It’s disgusting.