At 19, Greta Verbrick is wondering whether she’ll have to go through life without being able to taste food ever again.

“I like food, and my favorite foods bring me joy,” she observed.

Of course they do, for pretty much everyone. My mother always says food is one of the main joys of life, and — wait one second while I finish this dark chocolate orange mousse caramel truffle — I completely agree.

Verbrick, a University of Illinois student who works at the Park Ridge Country Club, loves pizza — or at least she loved it before she got COVID-19 in August. She lost her sense of taste and smell, and four months later, she still can’t taste or smell most things.

It’s been the same thing for Shay Borman, 24, who grew up in Wauconda and recently moved from Skokie to Chicago. After getting COVID-19 in October, he has zero ability to taste anything.

“It’s been difficult,” said Borman, who works in building maintenance and is training to be a welder. “I’ve lost a lot of weight because nothing satisfies me. Everything tastes like a gray blob.”

He tried cooking chicken recently, but it repulsed him and he couldn’t eat it. “It’s hard to gain an appetite when everything tastes like nothing,” he observed.

To put this in perspective, I, and these two young people, know COVID-19 has viciously killed far too many people and mercilessly left others with life- and health-threatening conditions. I’m grateful neither one of them suffered those fates, and so are they.

But the prospect of a person so young possibly facing years, or decades, without being able to smell or taste food is saddening. Food and drink are not only a pleasure, they are woven into our social lives. Getting together with family or friends usually means eating, but an inability to taste diminishes the enjoyment of these gatherings, which are a highlight of our lives. Or my life, anyway.

The only lighter moment Verbrick found in this sad scenario was when she let a friend — the only friend she allows in her strict social-distancing bubble — blindfold her and give her strong-flavored things to try. She couldn’t taste pickle juice, though it tingled a little, and she couldn’t, at the time, taste coffee, but she could tell the consistency had more body to it than water.

“I could feel it more than taste it,” she said.

Just recently, she tried a sip of java and it fell into the category of “things that taste wrong.” Coffee tastes like hand sanitizer to her; toothpaste tastes like chemicals. She worries the right tastes won’t return.

“At this point it feels like it’s never coming back, and that’s kind of alarming,” she said.

Borman worries too.

“Fruit is my favorite food, and the idea of never being able to taste it again terrifies me,” he said.

In the past, he has found that when moments of anxiety arise, the act of peeling fruit and eating it has been a calming act of self-care.

Then there’s the issue of safety. A garage on Verbrick’s block in Norwood Park burned down recently, but she couldn’t smell the smoke. If there’s ever another fire, or a gas leak, her nose won’t detect it, and that concerns her.

Borman wants to regain his sense of smell for future safety on the job as a welder, so he can identify any dangerous fumes emitting from the welding process.

Besides safety, the sense of smell gives us one more bit of magic: scents can trigger memories and emotions in our brains. Borman treasures the bottle of perfume that his late yia-yia, or grandmother (in Greek), left him as a memento. But now he can’t smell it, and that loss of connection saddens him.

So what are the chances these two will regain their senses of taste and smell? I put the question to Dr. Deborah Burnet at University of Chicago Medicine. She’s a professor of medicine and pediatrics, as well as chief of general internal medicine at the hospital, which has set up a post-COVID recovery clinic for people with serious lingering symptoms.

Burnet ticked off a list of after-effects COVID-19 patients suffer. The most serious include chest pain and carditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. There’s also fatigue, cough, shortness of breath, muscle pains, brain fog, mental and emotional disturbances, sleep problems, headaches, loss of taste and smell and others. It’s common for both younger and older COVID-19 patients to have lingering symptoms, she said.

Medical researchers have had nearly a year to study the virus, and based on that, Burnet said COVID-19 patients with longer-term symptoms have improved over time. While cautioning that no one can predict any individual’s reactions, she offered hope for Borman and Verbrick.

“My expectation is that they will go on to recover,” she said. “Neurological recovery of any sort can take weeks, or months. It takes time for nerves to recover their function.”

I certainly hope they, and other people who have suffered through COVID-19, will recover fully and live healthy lives, with joys like being able to smell cabernet sauvignon and taste spaghetti alla bolognese and savor crème brûlée, and … I could go on, but I’d better stop.

If you, too, enjoy food, let’s keep us all able to taste and smell. Wear the mask, keep the distance, avoid the gatherings. The vaccines are coming, but we need to stay resolute a while longer. Then, hopefully, we can lift the champagne glass, smell its delicate floral notes and drink, tasting relief and celebration.