From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is Daily.

Yesterday, we told the story of a rare but severe symptom of long COVID.

A far more common symptom is the long-term loss of smell. Today,

my colleague, Times Restaurant critic, Taisal Rao, recounts the quest to try to get hers back.

It's Tuesday, March 23rd.

I was in the bathroom at my home in Los Angeles and I was stepping into the shower and I smelled

something really unfamiliar. I thought maybe it was stagnant water or the plastic of the shower

cap that I was wearing to cover my hair. I thought maybe it was the stone tiles, like had someone

else just cleaned the bathroom. I couldn't figure it out. Then after a few minutes, I realized it was

actually a blank. There was no smell. I had just lost my sense of smell, just like that.

And I still went ahead and took a shower, but the whole time I was thinking, how soon can I get a test

for, you know, how soon can I get tested for COVID? I had very mild symptoms. It was just like a

rough flu or cold I was exhausted and my parents kept checking in, kept calling to remind me to eat,

but I've never experienced a loss of appetite like that before. Any kind of meat made me feel a

little bit queasy, so like roast chicken, which is a real comfort food for me normally, was just

very, very squishy and popcorn was like foam, but with sharp bits in it, like so unpleasant

all of a sudden, everything about it, that's a joy was very unpleasant.

I started to feel better in early to mid-January. I didn't have to pass out and sleep for half the day.

I could get back to work, but I still couldn't really smell anything.

Smell is just, it's so crucial to taste, which means it's really crucial to everything that I do,

I work as a restaurant critic, but I also develop recipes, and it's really difficult to

cook without a sense of smell if you're not used to it. You don't know what's going on, it's almost

...