If you start the HCQ immediately at the first sign of symptoms, your zinc can enter your cells and kill the relatively low number of viruses. However, if your first symptom is loss of taste and smell then you are already deficient in ZINC and it is even more important to include zinc in your treatment. Later in illness, the number of viruses is vastly larger and much harder to kill them all before they do serious harm to the body.
“...if your first symptom is loss of taste and smell then you are already deficient in ZINC”
I have not heard that before. Source?
...taste disturbances have included loss of taste (complete ageusia or partial hypogeusia) and altered taste (dysgeusia). For simplicity, we will use the term dysgeusia here to include ageusia and hypogeusia.
A European multicenter epidemiologic study analyzing the prevalence of olfactory and gustatory dysfunctions as a clinical presentation in a cohort of 417 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 with mild-to-moderate disease presentation reported that 88.8% of patients had gustatory disorders.
Yet another possible mechanism may involve zinc, which is thought to play an important role in taste perception. It is possible that zinc chelation through immune mechanisms and molecules known to increase in concentration with inflammatory processes may result in acute hypozincemia or a more localized change in cellular zinc homeostasis of oral gustatory cells as a result of infection by SARS-CoV-2 virus. This may result in taste disturbances similar to what has been observed in association with other processes leading to zinc insufficiency. Some randomized controlled trials have demonstrated benefit of zinc supplementation in patients with taste disturbances. In addition, zinc has been shown to inhibit coronavirus RNA polymerase activity in vitro and is thought to play a role in antiviral immune responses.
Systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials have concluded that zinc lozenges at a dose 75 mg per day or greater may decrease the duration of common cold symptoms in healthy children and adults. Common cold–like illnesses are caused by other coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, and adenoviruses, so there has been interest in using zinc supplements for prevention during the current pandemic.
It is of particular significance that dysgeusia (with or without olfactory symptoms) has been reported as an early or lone symptom of COVID-19 before involvement of the lungs or other organs. We hypothesize that changes in localized cellular zinc homeostasis in oral gustatory cells resulting from immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 viral replication may result in dysgeusia, which may or may not be accompanied by hypozincemia. If this is the case, the time of onset of dysgeusia may correspond with the time when zinc supplementation in the form of lozenges or syrups may be most effective because this localized delivery of zinc to oral and oropharyngeal mucosae may help control COVID-19 replication at early replication sites.