the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, according to Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security a loss of taste and smell—hypogeusia and hyposmia, respectively—has been reported as a potential early symptom of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This phenomenon is consistent with case reports of individuals infected with other coronaviruses. While it has not been widely documented in the scientific literature, there have been reports of patients exhibiting neurological symptoms, including hyposmia and hypogeusia, in Wuhan, China. A more complete understanding of how and why this phenomenon takes place could potentially enable its use in interpreting clinical progression of COVID-19. A study conducted at the Harvard Medical School (preprint) identified a pathway that could potentially explain these symptoms. Two genes required for SARS-CoV-2 cell entry are expressed by olfactory epithelial and stem cells but not olfactory sensory neurons, which could challenge the hypothesis that there is a neurological basis for the phenomenon.