An analytical study conducted by the Center for Innovation and Development in Artificial Intelligence “Siyadah” at Umm Al-Qura University identified the most common symptoms among people with the emerging coronavirus.

The study, which analyzed 270 tweets of people infected with the virus, confirmed that loss of smell was the most common symptom among people with coronavirus.

The study pointed out that most of the infected people noticed a loss of the sense of smell for some days, even if they did not witness many other symptoms of the virus, as most of the participants in the sample indicated that the return of the sense of smell again occurred suddenly within a period of time not exceeding a week from its loss.

The loss of sense of smell emerged as a more common symptom among the sample by 12% of the participants. The study also showed that the percentage of patients who confirmed that the loss of smell is the first symptom they felt increased by 300% last April from the numbers recorded in the same study during the month of March.

British studies have attributed the loss of the sense of smell to the fact that the part of the nose responsible for smelling odors is obscured by swelling of soft tissues when infected with the virus.