So many nurses and other healthcare staff in the UK may well have been infected with Covid-19 but they have not yet been diagnosed. This is according to a new study which has been done. The University of East Anglia has done the study and they have also worked with the University of London. They have found that a huge portion of the staff had in fact experienced a loss of taste or smell when the pandemic took off. A lot of the cases went undiagnosed at the time purely because there was not a lot of awareness regarding the smell or taste loss as a major symptom. If you work in hospital jobs or if you are part of an hospital staff recruitment agency then you will understand what a debilitating statistic this is, as it means that NHS workers most likely transmitted the disease to one another when they were needed the most on the front line.

Questionnaires were completed by over 260 staff at the Barts Health NHS Trust and they have found that two out of three staff suffered with the symptoms at some point between February and April. Less than a third of them were tested and the tests were in fact limited to those who had a high temperature or even a cough. 56 came back with a positive result. Evidence has shown that loss of smell may be the only symptom of Covid-19 and sometimes it may not even show any other symptoms at all. The findings may have shown that the coronavirus was circulating hospitals, but nothing was done as at the time, we did not know how the virus presented itself. Now we have access to way more data, it just goes to show that the virus can be much more controlled.