Hugh Grant is the latest celebrity to talk about his bout with COVID-19 and how at one point he was sniffing trash cans, because he was panicking about losing his sense of smell.
Actor Hugh Grant described the early symptoms of Coronavirus as feeling like "some enormous man sitting on my chest", when discussing it with Steven Colbert on A Late Show.
Grant was positive for COVID back in February and described the different sensations he felt with the disease. "It started as just a very strange syndrome where I kept breaking into a terrible sweat.... and my eyeballs felt about 3 sizes to big." He didn't know what he had but knew he was ill with something. He said panic set in, when he couldn't smell anything. "I thought, I can't smell a damn thing and you start to panic." His anxiety rose and he said "I started sniffing flowers, nothing. You get more and more desperate. I started sniffing garbage cans and you know you want to start sniffing people's armpits, because you can't smell a thing." I can't say I'd ever think... let me sniff some armpits or trash cans but desperate moments I guess.
Grant never actually had a test back when he claims he had the disease but did say he had an antibody test recently, and it showed signs of the anit-bodies still in his system, meaning he had to have had the disease in some capacity.
A similar instance happened to my wife in January. She came back from NY in late December, had all the symptoms they now describe as COVID, but they didn't know what it was back then. Our whole family got very ill for a week, and they told us it was just a respiratory infection. 4 months later, my wife also test positive for the anti-bodies. It's been here much longer than February.