I read something saying that it takes 6-12 months for the neural pathways for taste and smell recognition to reform in a permanent way.

I briefly lost my sense of taste and smell 2 years ago. I ‘got it back’ after a week, but everything is still less intense… maybe 20-30% muted. Some things came back with very distinct differences. Alcohol taste like rotten garbage, dairy tastes off, things I didn’t like aren’t as powerful and things I used to love don’t hit like they used to.

I tried retraining smell with different scented oils over the course of a few months, but didn’t really see any difference. Hell, maybe it worked on some things, but the things that it didn’t work for stand out in my mind… maybe that’s cognitive bias.

Other than that, I don’t have any lasting side effects. I don’t even know for sure that it was from Covid. By the time I realized I had a taste change, I tested a few times and never came up positive. I am assuming I had a case and was asymptomatic until the sense change and stopped shedding by the time I tested, but you can develop anosmia/parosmia from other viruses, like the flu, too.