The findings have a huge diagnostic impact, said Coelho, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU. “We now know that each variant has a different risk factor for associated smell and taste loss and have reason to believe that newer variants are less likely to impact smell and taste.” “As the pandemic continues and new variants emerge, this is very good news for patients,” said Daniel Coelho, M.D., lead author and a professor in the Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at the VCU School of Medicine.
Compared to rates of smell and taste loss during the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 before variants were identified, chances of smell and taste loss were just 17% for omicron, 44% for delta and 50% for the alpha variant. Researchers used a national database of over 3.5 million cases of patients who tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic.
(May 10, 2022) - People infected with the COVID-19 omicron variant are significantly less likely to develop smell and taste loss compared to those infected by delta and earlier COVID-19 variants, according to results published this month by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers in the journal Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery.
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