Fig. 2.

Perceived intensity of taste, smell, and oral irritation when sampling food or household items for six groups of participants. Participants are grouped according to COVID diagnosis or symptoms (from left to right) into COVID-positive (COVID+; N = 3,275), unknown COVID status (COVID?; N = 1,224), and COVID-negative (COVID−; N = 579), those who reported sudden smell/taste changes (STC; N = 4,271), those with other symptoms excluding smell or taste changes (OthS; N = 802), and those with no symptoms (NoS; N = 396). They rated the perceived intensity of smell, taste, and oral irritating stimuli using a visual analog scale (0–100). Points represent individual subject data (jittered horizontally), the center horizontal bars depict the median, the shapes reflect the density of the distribution, and the colored areas show interquartile ranges. For a similar presentation of data for self-reported chemosensory ability, see Supplementary Fig. 3.