What if the loss of smell made it easier to manage peaks in the hospital?

Odor loss is one of the symptoms of Covid 19. Illustration.

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• French researchers from Toulouse, Lyon and Nice took part in an international study on the loss of smell, anosmia, linked to Covid-19.

• Thanks to the examination of thousands of forms, but also by analyzing Google queries, they show that the olfactory loss of the inhabitants is a reliable indicator of the hospital stress to come in the region where they live.

• While the second wave is here, they suggest authorities use this inexpensive forecasting tool.

The finding is no longer debated: even if it does not appear every time, anosmia - in other words olfactory loss - is one of the symptoms of Covid 19. “Initially, the first Chinese studies did not make a link specific but from March, the specialists working on smell have created an international community of more than 500 researchers and we have put online a questionnaire for the general public, translated into more than 30 languages ​​”, says Denis Pierron, researcher in the evolutionary medicine team (AMIS, CNRS-UT3) in Toulouse.

Several thousand French people took part in the game. They provided scientists with precious raw material which, as the second wave hit France head-on, could prove to be very useful.

Because in a publication in the journal

, notably by Denis Pierron and Moustafa Bensafi, his colleague from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, the authors simply suggest that the public authorities consider olfactory loss as a tool for predicting hospital overload.

The angle of attack of Internet requests

Their research has indeed shown a "strong spatio-temporal" link between anosmia and hospital stress.

With hindsight, they indicate that in the regions most strongly affected by the first wave, as in the Grand Est for example, the peak of hospital overload appeared “ten days after” the peak of anosmia.

To the analysis of the questionnaires, they added data rather easy to obtain: the Google queries on the loss of taste and smell.

And the correlation is the same.

"The requests on cough and fever appear, then those on anosmia three days later and hospital overload about 10 days later", underlines Denis Pierron.

A simple online questionnaire (always available), a detailed analysis of Internet data, for the authors of the study, the tool would be "inexpensive" and, together with the other indicators, could make it possible to better anticipate waves of arrivals. in the hospital.

And even to evaluate the decisions taken to manage the pandemic.

Because, with the same methods, the researchers also believe that the containment was "very quickly effective".

"Internet research on anosmia began to decrease three days after the start of confinement", notes the Toulouse researcher.

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