Caballero’s post, which got over 170,000 likes and retweets, is a repeat of a joke post by @drewtoothpaste from December 2021 that showed an influx of similar reviews complaining about a lack of “scent” in Yankee Candle products.
While this could be a manufacturing problem on Yankee Candles part, a more likely explanation in Caballero’s estimation is that it suggests people are unknowingly losing their sense of smell, a common symptom of COVID-19.
“The first notion that there was a signal in crowd-sourced data to this effect came out of TikTok, very early in the pandemic,” Caballero, board-certified anesthesiologist and a founder of volunteer group Coders Against COVID, said.
“There were videos of folks fueling up their cars and complaining they couldn’t smell the gasoline, and as it turned out that loss of smell was a symptom of COVID. That’s how this observation of Yankee Candle scent reviews came about.”
Based on @drewtoothpaste’s tweet, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, Nicholas Beauchamp set to work. He wrote a paper on the phenomenon seemingly confirming that there is in fact a clear link. It appears that an upturn in negative reviews has become a predictive indicator in signaling that a COVID surge is coming.
“For anyone questioning this hypothesis? Look, it’s not about this one data point. It’s about looking at this one data point as a harbinger of what may be to come, and then we can confirm or refute, based on the official data,” Caballero continued.
“Even now, we can already see that there is corroborating evidence in official data, specifically in hospitalization or rather COVID admission rates that are starting to plateau or nadir, and may be also starting to trend upwards as we look at just the last five to seven days.”
The latest hospital admission rates available via the CDC were updated on September 30 but these figures currently do not show much of a rise in the number of COVID cases or hospital admissions.
Chris Stokel-Walker of The National Library of Medicine backed up Caballero and Beauchamp’s claim that bad candle reviews could help track COVID-19 cases stating that they can be used to predict infection spikes. However, despite the research that has gone into the theory, there are still naysayers of this piece of pop-science.
“Without a doubt there are going to be folks that are dubious of the findings but that’s where we look at other sources of data,” Stokel-Walker said.
Experts appear to vary with their predictions for the upcoming winter months. Dr. Rodney E. Rohde, a professor and chair of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at Texas State University told Newsweek that he’s hoping to see a calm COVID-19 season in the coming fall and winter months.
Newsweek has reached out to the parent company of Yankee Candles, Newell Brands, for comment.
