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Flu, cold, and SARS-nCov2, affect your smell, which is a large part of what people call "taste", but not all of it.

Your ability to taste the basic tastes: salty, bitter, sour, and sweet is unaffected because it is managed by your tongue, not your nose.

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"Loss of taste, one of the most common and frustrating symptoms of COVID-19 infection, appears to be associated with persistent damage to taste buds caused by low amounts of the virus that can linger for months or even more than a year."

https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/lingering-covid-virus-tongue-li...

the much more common symptom is loss of smell, characterized as "loss of taste" by laymen(/women/children). The very study you link to says so (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37265267/)

Well if we are going to use Occam's razor about symptoms, I think we should apply it to the overall situation as well.

Either Sysco is engaged in a conspiracy to poison us all with sugar packets for no apparent benefit. Or the much more logical conclusion that a person put a pack of sugar into their tea, it didn't sweeten it as much as they thought it should, they then convinced themself it wasn't sugar at all and when tasting it their belief that it wouldn't be sweet biased their observation.

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