The mornings in the era of the coronavirus begin with inventory. As soon as I wake up, even before I open my eyes, I take a deep breath. Good, I’m breathing. That goes in the win column. Fever? Nope, I’m cooler than jazz.

Before I can give the day’s all-systems-are-go message, I’ve gotta taste something. Practically anything, a Smith Bros. cough drop, a Jelly Belly, a shot of Michter’s rye whiskey. If I can taste it, I’m good. I may be walking around infected by COVID-19, but the philosophical question is, if you don’t show any symptoms, are you really sick?

The loss of one’s sense of taste is one of the symptoms of having COVID. Not everyone who’s infected experiences it, but enough victims do that medical experts say it should be enough to assume you at least have a mild case of the disease. Have a horrible and healthy meal and go to bed.

My sister, who was hit hard by the disease, didn’t have a loss of taste, but her daughter, who recovered from a mild case at home, did.

It’s more of a weird feeling than anything else, according to my beloved niece. And the fact that your sense of smell/taste returns in a few days, makes it more of a novelty than anything else. It gives you a chance to go on a health kick, throwing out pies and cupcakes and restricting your diet to things that are good for you but taste horrible—those two go hand-in-hand almost invariably. A brief, four-day binge on organ meats, goya, edamame, turnip tops, gooseberry and bitter gourd will make you so healthy you may never get sick again. Plus, you can rack up some cash from people betting you can’t eat that spoonful of durian from Southeast Asia.

The loss of taste that can accompany COVID, is actually a loss of smell. Those of us in the field of medicine as a hobby refer to it as anosmia. My late friend John had a twisted version of it a couple of decades ago, a form of taste disorder that I haven’t heard of since and can’t find any references to it on the Repository of All Human Knowledge. Occasionally, he would eat something. Say, crab cakes. And something would switch off in the flavor sector of his brain (stop me if I’m getting too technical) and for the next several days, everything he would eat would taste like crab cakes.

“How’s that beer taste?” I would ask him.

“It tastes like crab cakes,” he’d say.

I volunteered the fact that he probably had a brain tumor. As a diagnostician, I tend to start with the most dire guess, and then ease off from there.

I wasn’t the first person to have to break it to John that he might have a brain tumor. Long ago, a real doctor told him he had one and just had months to live. John went home for Christmas and spared his family the bad news so they could enjoy one last Christmas together happily. A few days into the new year, the doctor called and said, basically, “My bad. I had you mixed up with another patient. You’re fine. Proceed as normal.” So, see? Even the best of us make mistakes.

John’s locked-in taste phenomena struck two or three more times and it got to the point that he became exceedingly selective about what he ate, lest he get stuck with something he didn’t want all his food to taste like for a week. You don’t want to be sampling a plate of haggis on a bet and have your brain lock in on that taste for a week or two. Although, again, like with the COVID-related taste-loss, it would be a great way to lose some pounds.

Unfortunately for me, and others who don’t have any symptoms of carrying the coronavirus at the moment, a pint of ice cream still tastes delicious, and organ meats, while a rich source of iron, still taste gross.

So how are you holding up as we rocket toward Day 40 in Isolationland? Anything good on TV? Finish crocheted that hot pad yet? Making any headway on mastering the French language, mon petit ami? My rocket-scientist correspondent Daniel Villani is pretty excited to teach me about vectors, which seems to me to be several steps above trigonometry or calculus. He insists it’ll be fun. I hate it when people try to make education fun. I could always see right through “Schoolhouse Rock!” Anyhow, I’m always happy to hear what my fellow isolationists are doing to kill the enemy that is time. Drop me a line at [email protected], or @grobaty on Facebook and Twitter, if you can manage to get a word in edgewise between presidential tweets.

Tim Grobaty is a columnist and the Opinions Editor for the Long Beach Post. You can reach him at 562-714-2116, email [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter and Grobaty on Facebook.