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Nearly two weeks ago, Alessandro Laurenzi, a biologist working as a consultant in Bologna, Italy, was mowing the grass in his garden when a friend stopped him and said the mower reeked of fuel. “I couldn’t smell anything at all,” he tells The Scientist. That was in the morning. A few hours later, he went to have lunch and realized he couldn’t smell the food he was about to eat and when he took a bite, he couldn’t taste it either. Within a few days, he developed symptoms of COVID-19 and called his doctor to ask if he could get tested. Because his symptoms were mild, Laurenzi says, his doctor said no.
Laurenzi had heard anecdotally that many COVID-19 patients in Italy suffered from a loss of smell, so he started reading all the scientific papers he could find to see if his anosmia and ageusia ...
