When I get home I eat a piece. The bitterness of the chocolate overwhelms all else. But I have a second piece. And another. And then, an aroma like a spectre. It’s there, lavender, like it ought to be. Faint but powerful in its evocations, stimulating the hippocampus, bringing Provence and scented pillows into focus, counterpointing the sharpness of the cacao on my tongue like some benign floral ghost.

— Read more in I lost my sense of smell after Covid. Here’s what I’ve learned about life without it at The Guardian.

New research from Jefferson Health in Philadelphia suggests that a procedure called stellate ganglion block is somewhat effective at reducing parosmia in patients who suffered from the condition for at least six months after their Covid illness and didn’t respond to pharmaceutical or topical therapies.

The treatment involves injecting an anesthetic into the stellate ganglion — a tangle of nerves in the neck that deliver signals to the head, neck, arms and upper chest. It has been used for decades to treat chronic pain.

— Read more in Neck injection could improve smell issues in some long Covid patients at NBC News.

More than a quarter of the COVID-19 group still experienced olfactory dysfunction two years after infection, but after three years, the condition wasn’t significantly more common than in controls, the researchers found.

That’s reassuring for the 28 million Americans estimated to have endured a worse sense of smell after COVID-19.

— Read more in Loss of smell from COVID-19 takes up to three years to return, study finds at The Seattle Times.

It’s also not entirely clear how many people have anosmia. In 2012, research analyzing the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimated that 23 percent of Americans over the age of 40 report some alteration to their sense of smell. A 2016 paper that examined results from a later version of same survey estimated that more than 12 percent of American adults had some sort of olfactory dysfunction. And Fifth Sense, a charity for smell and taste disorders, estimates that 1 in 10,000 people have congenital anosmia.

— Read more in The Study of Smell Loss Still Struggles for Support at Undark.

The presence or absence of smell and taste loss is no longer a reliable way to tell if you’ve got COVID or not.

After looking at the National COVID Cohort Collaborative database—one of the largest collections of clinical data in the country for COVID research—researchers found that the loss of smell as a key indicator of COVID infection has dropped drastically over time.

— Read more in Losing Your Sense of Smell Is No Longer a Reliable Sign of COVID at VeryWell.