Hello, I'm Nulam Agarverin on the BBC World Service and this is BBC OS Conversations,

Loss of Smell and Taste.

COVID-19 affects people in many ways. For some it's the loss of taste and smell. For others it's

a range of symptoms that persist long after the initial infection. We'll hear from two parents

whose teenage children have long COVID. She started clutching her chest and saying she had

heart pain and at that point we realised that it definitely was with something a lot more serious

and then she stayed in bed for the next eight months. We'll hear more about that as well as

the mental effects of being unable to smell or taste as a result of COVID-19 a little later on.

But we'll start with Mexico where the government recently acknowledged it had under-reported

the number of COVID-related deaths. The revised data has more than doubled the number,

indicating that more than 321,000 people are now believed to have died.

Healthcare experts say it suggests many thousands in Mexico have died from the virus at home

and fear that the new figures may still underestimate the scale of the crisis.

Today we are going to hear from three doctors in Mexico City who've all been on the front line

treating patients. My colleague at James Reynolds spoke to Dolores Niembro, she's a doctor of medicine

and infectious diseases. Francisco Dardan, a doctor at the National Institute of Medical Sciences

and Nutrition Hospital and Diana Vilar Comte, she's an epidemiologist and doctor at the National

Cancer Hospital in the capital. It's probably been the most intense year of my professional life

and the emotions we've been through. The amount of suffering and death we have seen this past year,

it's above all of the imaginable things. Francisco, your hospital was the first

in Mexico to treat a COVID-19 patient in March 2020. How has it been since then?

Yeah, it's been a roller coaster of emotions. At first, we were deep in fear. The emotional

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