COVID may, indeed, do direct harm to taste buds.
that was published by JAMA Otolaryngology has now found that
Researchers led by Italy's University of Trieste worked with 105 people who had reported"a disruption of their ability to taste sweet, sour, salty, or bitter more than 3 months after a SARS-CoV-2 infection" to look for signs of"possible damage to their taste buds," according to. After conducting tests that focused on both smell and taste, 42% of participants were found to have"hypogeusia—a loss of basic tastes.
While there may have been other reasons for the damage to tastebuds, Claire Hopkins, professor of rhinology at Guy's Hospital, London, in the United Kingdom, and one of the authors of the study, told,"There is some difficulty in self-rating true taste loss versus reduced flavor perception, which is a consequence of smell loss. … This leads to over-reporting of taste loss, and it has been largely assumed that this accounts for most reported alterations in taste disturbance after COVID.