• Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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      10 hours ago

      Just a guess based on “covid” and “candles”, a ton of people negatively reviewed candles for not smelling good/right/at all, not realizing they had lost their sense of smell from covid at the time.

      I know my spouse had the realization our cold was covid because we couldn’t smell the candles we had bought (and smelled) the week before.

      • tpyo@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        I had been a bit sick and I had the realization when I went to sniff some weed and I couldn’t smell it. I’d been able to smell earlier in the day and it was a weird realization. I went around and sniffed everything I could hoping to get a whiff

        It was extremely bizarre. I’ve had muted sense of smell and taste because of a sickness but never an absence of the sense

        • moakley@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Conversely I woke up in the middle of the night with a cold and couldn’t smell Vick’s VapeoRub, which usually has an extremely strong menthol scent.

          I got tested, talked to a doctor, and didn’t have COVID. It’s possible we lose our sense of smell sometimes with other types of colds too, but we never noticed because we didn’t panic about it.

          • DarkSirrush@piefed.ca
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            2 hours ago

            When was this? For the first year and a half or so, the more commonly used test kits had something like a 40% false negative rate.

    • vodka@feddit.org
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      10 hours ago

      Yankee candle rating dropped sharply (or at least statistically significant) during covid with reviews of them being negative because they had little to no smell.

      Loss of smell being a covid symptom.

      Edit: oh and yeah it would go up and down based on larger outbreaks. So it followed the early waves of mass outbreaks basically 1:1

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
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        4 hours ago

        What’s more surprising to me is that there’s a big enough stream of reviews for a candle to see this effect.