smell loss – Chrissi Kelly’s smell disappeared after a virus during a trip to the Czech Republic—years before Covid put the world’s attention on anosmia. Today, researchers estimate up to 22 percent of people live with smell impairments, while studies linked Covid-19 to wi
About 14 years ago, Chrissi Kelly lost her sense of smell. It began on a trip to the Czech Republic to visit family, when she caught a virus. For months afterward, she couldn’t smell anything.
When the problem didn’t clear on its own. she went from appointment to appointment. starting with her general practitioner and then an ear. nose and throat specialist. searching for answers. She was diagnosed with anosmia. smell loss so complete it leaves a person navigating a world without a key sensory signal.
What she was told next is what many people with the condition hear: that she’d have to learn to live with it. For Kelly, that wasn’t a gentle adjustment—it was a rupture.
“After about six months of complete loss, I was just climbing the walls, and I did not feel like myself anymore,” she says.
Her experience captures why smell disorders can be so devastating. Researchers estimate that up to 22 percent of the population lives with smell impairments. including hyposmia. partial smell loss. and anosmia. complete smell loss. For others, the problem isn’t just absence. Some live with phantosmia, in which phantom smells appear. Others experience parosmia, where scents that are usually pleasant—coffee or shampoo—turn highly unpleasant, like feces or vomit.
Yet for years, smell disorders have struggled for recognition. They’ve been poorly understood, underdiagnosed, and often minimized by clinicians.
Then Covid changed the spotlight. With SARS-CoV-2 spreading widely, the sense of smell became impossible to ignore. The World Health Organization reported 780 million cases of Covid-19 since December 2019—many more likely unreported—and smell loss became a well-known symptom. In a 2023 survey published in the journal Laryngoscope, 60 percent of individuals with Covid experienced smell loss. Most cases were temporary, but some persisted over the longer term.
The pandemic brought an abrupt concentration of cases where noses malfunctioned at roughly the same time. That scale mattered. As scientists learn more about how smell works, evidence is mounting that smell is tied not only to quality of life, but also to brain health.
Kelly’s story is personal, but it points to the same central question now drawing more attention from researchers: what happens when one of the body’s most basic warning systems stops working—and why, for too long, so many people have been left to handle the loss largely on their own.
anosmia smell loss hyposmia phantosmia parosmia Covid-19 Laryngoscope World Health Organization brain health