Nadine Dorris says she has completely lost her sense of taste and smell after contracting coronavirus

Health minister first MP to test positive for Covid-19

Health minister Nadine Dorries says she has “completely lost” her sense of taste and smell after contracting coronavirus.

The cabinet member has been in isolation since 6 March after becoming unwell. Her diagnosis was confirmed on 11 March.

She first displayed symptoms on the same day in which she attended an event at Downing Street to mark International Women’s Day.

“A side effect of #coronavirus for me is the fact that I have lost 100 per cent of taste and smell,” Ms Dorries tweeted on Thursday. “Absolutely zero of both, so weird. Eating and drinking warm or cold that’s all I can tell. No point in putting a tea bag in the water.”

She is one of a number of MPs to be diagnosed with coronavirus.

Labour’s Kate Osborne and Lloyd Russell-Moyle both tested positive for the virus this week.

Several other MPs have entered into self-isolation amid concerns of an outbreak in Westminster.

Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions took place in a half-empty House of Commons, after Labour and the Conservatives told MPs not scheduled to raise a query to stay away.

The government asked politicians “respectfully” to “adhere to this advice”.

Following her diagnosis, Ms Dorries later confirmed that she had passed coronavirus, otherwise known as Covid-19, on to her mother.

“Unlike with my situation, we know exactly where she caught it from and the irony is, despite her having had major surgery to replace the valves in her heart damaged by childhood illness, despite her pacemaker and breathlessness, her lifetime of smoking, hard work in her early years and poor diet, she had much milder symptoms than me,” the health minister wrote in The Times last week.

Addressing her own symptoms, she said: “I had no sore throat, no mucous, my cough was dry and unproductive. Every muscle ached and the pain felt as though it were lodged deep in my bones.

“But I will never know how I became infected with Covid-19, only that I am one of the first people in the country to have been identified who has not recently been abroad or been in close contact with someone who had returned from abroad.”