Back in 2020 when we began to shutter ourselves at home and isolate, there began a trend that was pretty telling of the time. Yankee Candle and other top scented candle companies began receiving bad reviews. Now you might not think this means anything, but essentially because of the loss of smell from having COVID-19, customers were no longer able to smell what should have been a definite aroma.
Yankee Candle is held in high regard and sold almost everywhere. The scents they have are iconic. Macintosh apple, clean cotton, midnight jasmine and others are bought in large quantities almost daily. Not to mention the car air fresheners! So when they started getting bad reviews in 2020, internet sleuths started watching the trend.
Kate Petrova has organized some data on this subject. She’s a research assistant with the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Bryn Mawr College, and searched thousands of reviews by looking up key phrases such as “lack of scent” or “no smell.”
Two holiday seasons in a row, 2020 and 2021, there were dips in the reviews for scented candles online. Another Twitter user who posted an image of negative reviews last holiday season recently shared another image of them. Only this time it was from a few days ago.
Again another Twitter user, Nick Beauchamp, an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, chimed in. He posted a graph with Drewtoothpaste’s negative reviews, showing the highs and lows between reviews and showing the exact dates when they went down. Each area where there is a dip is when there was a larger COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S.
If this is any sign of growing rates of COVID-19 we should all be careful when going out. Sure it could just be Spring allergies, but just make sure that’s all it is.
Just within the past week there has been a new “stealth omicron” variant discovered. The new BA.2 Covid strain spoken about by Professor Adrian Esterman is “pretty close to measles, the most contagious disease we know about.” Easterman is an Epidemiologist and biostatistican, and predicts that it’s at least six times more contagious than the original strain.
If you need to buy test kits, Target has two in a box for around $8.
