UC San Diego study solidifies loss of smell, taste as symptoms of COVID-19
A University of California San Diego study published over the weekend was the first to use data to solidify the loss of taste and smell as symptoms of COVID-19, researchers said Monday.
The studys authors hope the findings help people better screen for the contagious disease.
If you have smell and taste loss, you are more than 10 times more likely to have COVID-19 infection than other causes of infection, said Carol Yan, a head and neck surgeon at UC San Diego Health and one of the authors of the study. The most common first sign of a COVID-19 infection remains fever, but fatigue and loss of smell and taste follow as other very common initial symptoms.
Yan and her colleagues surveyed 1,480 patients who underwent testing for COVID-19 at UC San Diego Health from March 3 to March 29. Of those individuals, 102 patients tested positive and 1,378 tested negative.
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