Doctor Alain Corré, ENT at the Rothschild Foundation Hospital is, with the infectiologist Dominique Salmon, one of the two French doctors to have alerted on a new peculiarity of Covid-19: the sudden loss of smell, without nasal obstruction . Eat a spoonful of mustard or bite into a toothy lemon? For the doctor, it is necessary to be able to re-educate one's sense of smell without attacking it by daily smelling odors present in the cupboards of our kitchens. "Cinnamon, thyme, whatever you have at home," he explains.
If the food seems tasteless, the doctor advises to favor foods based on umami, a flavor very present in Asian gastronomy. Finally, it is advisable to avoid washing the nose with physiological saline, because instead of evacuating the virus, "the patient could inhale" and send it to his bronchi.
It would seem, according to the first studies carried out by French ENT specialists, that the loss of smell with Covid-19 is due to an inflammation of the olfactory slit, a small slit located at the very top of the nose, which normally allows the transmission of olfactory information to the brain.