Anosmia, or the loss of smell, is one of the most common manifestations of COVID-19, and one of the symptoms that differentiates it from other diseases with similar characteristics.
As it is clearly evident in the graph, during the first months of the pandemic when few things about COVID-19 were known and testing was scarce, many individuals noticed the loss of smell and turned to the internet to find out what was wrong. The magnitude of these searches at the end of March 2020, translated a few weeks later to hundreds of deaths.
The story repeated itself many times, throughout all COVID-19 waves. People noticed they couldn't smell, searched it on Google, and then a few days later cases were up, and a few weeks later deaths rose as well.
Source: StaDaFa
