I lost my sense of taste and smell for a few days when I had covid, I was eating a bowl of spicy ramen at the time and I completely lost the ability to taste anything over the course of about 2 minutes. No spice, no salt, nothing. I usually have a pretty high spice tolerance, but to be certain I ate an entire birds eye chili. This would normally leave me in pretty excruciating pain for a few minutes, it did nothing. Strange that others report retaining their spice taste to some degree, that wasn't my experience at all. I wonder what was different?