The antiviral drug ensitrelvir eases both smell and taste loss, and is one of the few COVID-19 drugs available to people not at high risk of grave illness.

New clinical-trial data suggest that an antiviral pill called ensitrelvir shortens the duration of two unpleasant symptoms of COVID-19: loss of smell and taste. The medication is among the first to alleviate these effects and, unlike other COVID-19 treatments, is not reserved only for people at high risk of severe illness.

  • @YoBuckStopsHereEnglish
    -17•8 months ago

    If you still don’t have taste and smell you are actually still infected. The virus embedded itself in your mouth and you’ll require medication to kill it completely.

    Source

    • GroteStreet 🦘English
      27•8 months ago

      I’m guessing you’re receiving downvotes because that’s such an extraordinary claim with no supporting evidence.

      So I did a search and actually found this published journal article from July this year.

      It did show both active viruses, and active immune responses in biopsied tongue cells of people with taste loss. Some even a year after infection. The activity is too small to be picked up by nasal swab PCR, but they’re there.

      But your claim of “you’ll require medication to kill it completely” may not be entirely true. In all cases within the study, there was immune system activity in the tongue, and eventually the taste buds did recover.

      • @YoBuckStopsHereEnglish
        -7•8 months ago

        The medication would be what the story is about. It’s like Chicken Pox, we never get rid of the virus, it lives inside of us until it appears again as Shingles. In some people covid appears to survive for years unless treated.

                • GroteStreet 🦘English
                  2•8 months ago

                  Ah. So the article that - after mentioning all the other scary stuff like ebola and HIV - concluded with 10 paragraphs basically saying how sars-cov-2 is quite dissimilar to them? How most other coronavirus infections are short-lived?

                  Or, “Covid-19 long-haulers are probably not dealing with the virus for months on end. Rather, … that the immune system is trying to repair the damage”.

                  The one that ends with the quote that, for the majority of people, "It gets in, it gets out”?

        • @Fedizen
          3•8 months ago

          My understanding was chicken pox is hard to get rid of because it goes into a “dormant” state where it embeds viral dna in living host nuclei.

          From everything I’ve read Covid doesn’t work like that and afaik it doesn’t have some kind of dormant state.

          • @YoBuckStopsHereEnglish
            -2•8 months ago

            Covid did a lot of strange things at first. It got into people’s blood systems, it lingered in taste buds, it caused brain damage. After it mutated it lost a lot of that ability and became just another cold like virus.