Smell Test - The Risk Management Tool for Coronavirus

The inability to smell was the first symptom many patients noticed; in some cases, it was the only symptom the patients noticed. 

That's from ever-fascinating Michael Lewis. Signup and get involved @ sniffoutcovid.

Mike adds:

Another possibility is that a lot more people than we know — even 80-year-old people — have had the virus but never got sick enough to get themselves tested. That’s what’s so interesting about the simple, one-page letter written last week by two British doctors. Claire Hopkins and Nirmal Kumar, among the country’s most prominent ear, nose and throat specialists, had both noticed the same odd symptom in their coronavirus patients: a loss of the sense of smell. “Anosmia,” it is called, but I suppose they have to call it something.

The inability to smell was the first symptom many patients noticed; in some cases, it was the only symptom the patients noticed. “In the past it was once in a blue moon that we saw patients who had lost their sense of smell,” Kumar told me. “Now we are seeing it 10 times as often. It’s one of the things that happens with this virus.” The British doctors compared notes with doctors from other countries and gathered what data they could. They concluded that roughly 80% of the people who lost their sense of smell would test positive for the coronavirus, and that somewhere between 30% and 60% of those who had tested positive for the virus had also lost their sense of smell.

Those numbers might turn out to be a bit off — maybe even way off. They are a heroic guess, given how little testing has been done. But it’s precisely the scarcity of tests that makes the observation so intriguing, as it offers the possibility of a crude alternative to a test. Lose your sense of smell and you know to isolate yourself, even if you feel great.

It offers two other things as well: a way to glimpse the virus as it moves through various populations, and a tool for managing the risk. Oddly, hardly anyone who read the doctors’ letter had this thought — or, at any rate, hardly anyone who got in touch with the doctors. “We’ve had more than a thousand responses,” Kumar said. “But almost no one really seeing it as a risk management tool.” The exception was a former Wall Street guy, an Englishman named Peter Hancock.

Hancock had spent much of his career at JPMorgan, where, in the late 1990s, he had served as the bank’s chief risk officer. After the financial crisis he’d been tapped to run the giant risk management mess that was AIG. When he read the letter written by the British doctors, he thought, “Here might be a free way to get a signal, out of all the noise.”