Purpose <p>Millions of cases of long-COVID have been identified worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic few years ago, with many affected individuals severely debilitated. Understanding the symptoms of long-COVID, explaining how they are related to each other, and how the clinical course of the disease can be predicted based on these symptoms remains a significant challenge in the community. The aim of the present study is to address this challenge with a view to understanding the relative importance of loss of smell and taste, a common sensory deficit associated with the disease, in long COVID symptomatology.</p> Method <p>To this end, we studied 525 people with COVID-19 resident in France via an online questionnaire reporting their symptoms together with their subjective assessment of recovery. Descriptive approaches and machine learning algorithms were then used to extract symptom associations and risk factors for long-COVID.</p> Results <p>Results revealed that olfactory/gustatory symptoms were not systematically correlated with other symptoms. We find two distinct groups of patients with olfactory/gustatory symptoms: one group that recovers rapidly and the other (older group) that develops long-COVID. Cognitive, cardiac and cutaneous/inflammatory symptoms were correlated and associated with long-COVID.</p> Conclusion <p>Chemosensory losses are not systematically associated with the development of long COVID. Chronic olfactory losses may have a different disease mechanism to acute losses. Symptom profiles six weeks after diagnosis (particularly cognitive symptoms) can provide useful indications of how the disease will progress.</p>