how long does it take to get your taste buds back after a cold

But to really appreciate flavors, you need to be able to smell.” “We haven’t found any damage to cells that directly support the sense of taste. “Taste goes hand in hand with the sense of smell,” he says. Senior says, but that problem may be caused by the inability to smell. People with COVID-19 also report being unable to taste food, Dr. COVID-19 Can Make It Harder to Taste Food “But it can be quite disturbing for patients, especially since it’s unclear what the time frame is for improvement.”ĭisruption to the sense of smell can happen to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people with COVID-19, but vaccinated people tend to have milder symptoms overall and are much less susceptible to serious illness. “The good news is that people do recover,” Dr. With omicron and its subvariants, about 1 in 5 people lost their sense of smell. As many as half of all people who had earlier variants of COVID-19 lost their sense of smell. “It was really quite a difficult symptom.”Ī loss or disruption of the sense of smell is a well-known symptom of COVID-19, says UNC Health rhinologist Brent Senior, MD. “I felt like I was eating an ashtray,” she says. But soon after she started smelling smoke, she began to taste ashes. Her headaches, brain fog and sharp pains in her hands, legs and feet were more concerning than changes to her ability to smell.

Then, throughout the fall and winter, I experienced a variety of long COVID symptoms.” “I was pretty sick for about a week,” she says. She doesn’t recall whether she lost her ability to smell during her initial illness because her other symptoms were worse. Eskridge was experiencing the first disruption to her sense of smell caused by COVID-19, which she had been infected with eight months before, back in June 2020. “I was in the clinic, and it smelled like someone had left a floor heater on,” she says, recalling a moment in early 2021.

Speech language therapist Hannah Eskridge, MSP, was sure she smelled something burning.

How long does it take to get your taste buds back after a cold