Performance of formal smell testing and symptom screening for identifying SARS-CoV-2 infection

Altered sense of smell is a commonly reported COVID-19 symptom. The performance of smell testing to identify SARS-CoV-2 infection status is unknown. We measured the ability of formal smell testing to identify SARS-CoV-2 infection and compared its performance with symptom screening.

A convenience sample of emergency department patients with COVID-19 symptom screening participated in smell testing using an eight odor Pocket Smell Test (PST). Participants received a SARS-CoV-2 viral PCR test after smell testing and completed a health conditions survey. Descriptive analysis and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve models compared the accuracy of smell testing versus symptom screening in identifying SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Two hundred and ninety-five patients completed smell testing and 87 (29.5%) had a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test. Twenty-eight of the SARS-CoV-2 positive patients (32.2%) and 49 of the SARS-CoV-2 negative patients (23.6%) reported at least one of seven screening symptoms (OR = 1.54, P = 0.13). SARS-CoV-2 positive patients were more likely to have hyposmia (≤5 correctly identified odors) than SARS-CoV-2 negative patients (56.1% vs. 19.3%, OR = 5.36, P<0.001). Hyposmia was 52.9% (95% CI 41.9%-63.7%) sensitive and 82.7% (95% CI 76.9%-87.6%) specific for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Presence of ≥1 screening symptom was 32.2% (95% CI 22.6%-43.1%) sensitive and 76.4% (70.1%-82.0%) specific for SARS-CoV-2 infection. The ROC curve for smell testing had an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.74 (95% CI 0.67-0.80). The ROC curve for symptom screening had lower discriminatory accuracy for SARS-CoV-2 infection (AUC = 0.55, 95% CI 0.49-0.61, P<0.001) than the smell testing ROC curve.

Smell testing was superior to symptom screening for identifying SARS-CoV-2 infection in our study.