So, as we've been told, COVID sometimes affects the sense of smell.......just leaves one without it!
There are those who think the increase in complaints from people who lose their sense of smell, indicates an oncoming surge in COVID. When these surges occur, so do the Instagram complaints about Yankee Candles losing their scents.........

"While there's a healthy dose of skepticism around this concept, there's actually some data to support it, courtesy of Nick Beauchamp, an associate professor in the department of political science at Northeastern University."

Beauchamp tells Yahoo Life that he first dove into the data surrounding Yankee Candle reviews and COVID-19 cases after spotting memes that linked the no-smell reviews to a rise in cases. "Mostly the memes were laughing at the idea of people having COVID, not knowing it, and blaming candles," he says. Beauchamp says he "had a couple of spare hours," so he looked into the data and found a link to a rise in these reviews and a jump in COVID cases. He shared the image on Twitter and it went viral. "I said, 'Oh, shoot — I guess I have to do this properly,'" he explains.

Beauchamp ended up writing a scientific paper on his findings. He used a Google Chrome extension that grabbed 9,837 Amazon reviews for the four most popular Yankee Candles during a 172-week period between 2018 and 2021. He then calculated the percentage per week of reviews that mentioned phrases like "no smell" or "no scent" and plotted that data over information on COVID-19 cases during the same period. He also controlled for factors such as seasonal upticks of candle purchases and COVID-19 cases.

 He discovered that a rise in COVID-19 cases also led to an increase in bad reviews for candles — specifically, for every 100,000 new COVID-19 cases a week, there was a quarter of a percentage point increase in "no smell" reviews the following week.