Don’t mistake me, because I would gladly probably take Paxlovid again (especially if there was an nasty new variant).
That said, the entire 5 days I was on it — and my wife too — EVERYTHING tasted like sucking on a bag of nickels. And I mean continuously. While we were eating, we could sort of half-taste our food kinda halfway-way OK. But the minute we stopped eating, it was back to that strong metallic taste.
When I was a kid, did you ever touch the two poles of a 9V battery to your tongue to test it? It was THAT taste for 5 days, 24 hours a day.
We chewed lots of gum, and at LOTS of red-hot cinnamon candies — and despite all my bitching here, it absolutely wasn’t that bad — and we definitely felt it was better than the alternative.
Far as the Covid itself, it wasn’t quite as bad as the worst cold either of us had ever gotten. But we do attribute that to our both taking the Plaxovid so quickly, and we’d take it again.
(I think we each lost 10 lbs over 7-10 days, easily, because food just didn’t taste all that great — which, again, was a good problem to have.)