You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Maddie Sifaya here with shortwave reporter Emily Kwong.

Hey Maddie, hey you.

So Kwong, you have been poking your little nose into something a little strange.

Yes, stories about people suddenly losing their sense of taste and smell.

That's right, it's really strange.

So doctors from Italy to China, South Korea to the US are reporting some cases where people

are losing their sense of taste and or smell and later testing positive for the coronavirus.

Weird.

But okay, these are only stories, right?

This is anecdotal at this point.

That's right, there's no published scientific literature showing that A, the coronavirus

even disrupts your smell system and B, the mechanism for how it would even do that.

But doctors around the world are trading stories on international messaging boards and

in phone calls about rising cases of anosmia, which is the scientific term for a loss of

sense of smell and how some of those anosmia patients are testing positive for the coronavirus.

So really the question is, is this connection real or is it some artifact or weird coincidence

that a few doctors are seeing and reacting to?

Exactly, we don't know.

This virus is so new that we still have so much to learn about it, which takes time.

Right, I mean, science is purposefully deliberate and methodical and honestly in my experience

slow.

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