An absent or perverted sense of smell is going to be a real liability in areas where the food supply is not safe, meaning crowded cities in both Africa and Asia. People are just not going to be able to detect tainted food by its odor and food borne illness and death are going to start to increase.
My own sense of smell disappeared for weeks in 2020 and is still a little hit or miss, although I count myself lucky that I'm not constantly smelling shit or garbage. It's accurate, just blunted most of the time. Other problems have disappeared, like the outrageous typos I was making that I couldn't see unless I left a post languishing for half an hour or so before I reread it for errors. Nowadays my Typoese is back to what it always was, fangled tingers.
Covid does seem to be slowly attenuating, becoming more contagious but with less serious illness. Eventually it will most likely become a sixth common cold coronavirus. I wish we could speed up the process, but that seems to be as much of a challenge as eliminating it altogether, not going to happen. In the meantime, there will most likely be a new shot every couple of years to cover new variants and wise people will keep up with them.
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