The deputy chief medical adviser for England on Monday defended the government’s decision not to add loss of the sense of smell to the list of possible symptoms of coronavirus until today.
“Anosmia has been recognized for some time now as a possible symptom of Covid-19,” Jonathan Van-Tam said, using the medical term for loss of the sense of smell.
But he said it was not the only possible symptom, and “very rarely” appeared on its own as an early warning of the virus.
“What we had to do was do some very careful analysis behind the scenes” of which symptoms beyond fever and cough were “useful or important to add” to the list, Van-Tam said.
“That’s why we have taken our time in this country, because we wanted to do that again painstaking and very careful analysis before we jumped to any conclusions,” he said.
"And even if it was barn-door obvious that anosmia was part of this, we wanted to be sure that adding it to cough and fever — as opposed to just listing it, adding it in formally in to our definition — was the right thing to do,” Van-Tam added.
The government added the symptom today.
Challenged by a reporter to say how many cases of coronavirus were missed as a result of not listing the condition as a symptom earlier, Van-Tam said, “I don’t have those figures to my fingertips,” but added that Public Health England data on the first several hundred confirmed cases in the country showed 0.44% reported loss of sense of smell on its own as a symptom..
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