Sore throat, then congestion: Common Covid symptoms follow a pattern now, doctors say
Doctors who treat Covid describe the ways the illness has gotten milder and shifted over time to mostly affect the upper respiratory tract.
Doctors say they're finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish Covid from allergies or the common cold, even as hospitalizations tick up.
The illness' past hallmarks, such as a dry cough or the loss of sense of taste or smell, have become less common. Instead, doctors are observing milder disease, mostly concentrated in the upper respiratory tract.
"It isn’t the same typical symptoms that we were seeing before. It’s a lot of congestion, sometimes sneezing, usually a mild sore throat," said Dr. Erick Eiting, vice chair of operations for emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Downtown in New York City.
The sore throat usually arrives first, he said, then congestion.
As a person who is on the tail end of COVID infection, this describes my current symptoms.
I never tested myself because I just thought it was a cold, but that describes my symptoms too. Started with sore throat which wasn't too bad and went away. Then the next day congestion and exhaustion, with just a little bit of sneezing.
These symptoms lasted nearly a month after my covid infection.
Same for me as well
Do the old covid tests still work? Ive had this cold several times this year and always covid negative.
The answer is yes they are still as effective, dont let anyone here convince you otherwise. The base protein has not mutated and that is what is being checked when you do this chromatography style test.
They have a much higher false negative rate now than they used to. Thats probably due to changes in the virus itself and lower viral load as people have higher levels of immunity now. However if you test positive you can still be pretty certain you have covid.
Yes, also recognition that some people may have symptoms and test negative or feel fine and test positive. That’s also why there is no recommendation to test again. If someone pops a positive recommendations say to stay home for 5 days then mask for 5 more. There is no benefit to additional testing because of natural variation in antibody production and function.
Mind the expiration dates.
My pneumologist had me do blood lab tests for "igm and igm"and according to him they are the best options right now, he doesn't trust the cotton swab one.
I simply had the worst sore throat I’ve ever had. No congestion. Then I lost my sense of smell for about 6 months. That was awful. Very grateful it came back.
So is there any real way to say if this is because of widespread vaccination or because the virus itself has lost some lethality genes
Not a scientist, but I'd guess mostly B, maybe helped along with some of A.
The goal of a virus is to replicate, and it does that better when it's less lethal
Just a very small correction- as with all biology, natural selection will drive a virus to replicate more effectively, that’s it. This does NOT mean a virus will automatically become less lethal over time. That’s an older hypothesis that scientists found was not in line with observation.
The newer hypothesis is known as “virulence-transmission trade-off”. The oversimplification of the idea is that if a mutation increases both transmission and virulence, it will also tend to be selected for. COVID is inconsistent with both hypotheses in certain ways though, so really predicting its virulence in the short or long term has proven difficult. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/
The old idea isn't wrong per se, lower lethality is a good survival trait. It just has to be weighed against the value of transmission, which would intuitively have a much higher value. In covid, the lethality rate is even less inpactful because it is contagious for a relatively long period before the host would suffer severe illness. But low lethality is still a good thing, and in such a widespread disease one would still expect that trait to become more pronounced eventually. That doesn't mean it necessarily would, statistically likely doesn't mean certain, especially if a particular mutation gave it a substantial bump to both traits it may never be selected out for example. But the current trend seems to be a result of this likelihood.
Lethality is only a significant limiter when the population decreases enough that the virus has significant oroblems finding bodies as hosts. The human population is global with freedom to move globally. Lethality was never a limiter for covid, and won't be without much higher Lethality rates.
Doubly so when it can cross species'. Covid could kill every person on the planet, not care two shits about it, and just hop over to deer, dogs, cats, rodents, etc.
I know it effects deer, so I'd suspect the rest of the ungulates. I wouldn't be surprised if it can effect a large swath of mammelia.
The “old idea” is actually baked into one of the parameters of the new model. It’s why I said the old hypothesis “was not in line with observation” rather than being “wrong”. It predicted some trends correctly, but failed to predict many others. Like all science, it needed to update as we gathered more info.
The “new” hypothesis also isn’t perfectly predictive of viral evolution, but it’s more accurate with the observed spread of other diseases. Like all models, it’ll get replaced eventually by something more powerful. Likely sooner rather than later specifically because COVID put a spotlight on a lot of holes in the idea.
Viruses don’t have goals. You are anthropomorphizing them. What viruses do is mutate. If mutations have more fitness, they will spread more effectively. That says nothing about mortality nor morbidity. With this disease it spreads in the early stage, which long before the person who has caught it either dies, recovers, gets long COVID, etc.
It's not anthropomorphizing, it's abstraction and it's incredibly common in evolutionary science to speak in this manner.
The downvotes you are getting are stupid. This is exactly correct.
True yeah, but it was kind of a “no shit” response.
There are zero downvotes...
Do you understand the concept of time? There were downvotes.
I think it may depend on your instance what up/down votes you see cause I still see downvotes on that comment but I have a different instance than any of you.
Downvotes don't federate. I see no downvotes as a kbin user, but a Lemmy user might.
Too little time for B, has to be A
It helps that it already killed millions of the more susceptible early on before immunity started.
Not sure how statistically significant this is in the overall numbers, though.
Scheduled next boost for next week.
I finally caught it earlier this year. Thanks to vax, it was similar to a cold / flu. Was mostly better after a few days.
Medical science is awesome. I couldn't be happier about how it turned out. What a relief.
New vax wasnt approved on yet I thought..
Approved in the US and OZ that I've seen. Certainly others by now.
The EMA recommeded it recently. I think that has to filter down into member states now. So for the EU next week would probably be too soon. For Switzerland it's not approved yet. But maybe in other non-EU countries somewhere?
I don't think they're even doing boosters where I live, at least not for general population
That was the basic progression when I had it a few months ago if you add fever and chills.
Huh, I have exactly that. Dunno if covid though of just some flu
Take a test?
Oh, I'm not that curious
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. I can't afford to pay for a test every time I get the sniffles either. Also, America showed me they dgaf a couple years ago, so now I just throw on the mask and go about my business.
Maybe they're disappointed I'm leaving them hanging? I really dunno
That's kind of the mystery, isn't it?
Indeed
Is this propaganda? My wife just recovered from covid and it knocked her on her ass. Yes upper respiratory was true, but nausea, fever, fatigue, fainting, body pain, loss of taste all happened
Just because an individual case doesn't fit the trend does not automatically make the news propaganda.
This article is a bit of propaganda though. That doesn't mean it isn't true or anything. But running an article in the news about how much milder the disease is, is still going to have an effect on how people respond to it.
I think you might be using too broad a definition of propaganda. The result of influencing opinion does not make something propaganda. Propaganda needs some intent to persuade or push an agenda.
The article might be propaganda, largely that depends on the motivations for writing and publishing it. But the fact that the content of the article might change people's opinions does not make it propaganda.
Nah.
A bar this article very easily clears. What to publish is a choice. A choice was made to publish this article, with obvious influence on opinion and action.
Nah. Intent a nonsense metric. We can bicker forever about intent. Because we cannot know anyone's mind.
Using intent as a metric gives a lot of propaganda a free pass. Because we can't prove intent.
So you just don't know what propaganda is, got it.
Oh sod off then, dickhead.
Nah.
That wasn't directed at you. But I guess I said "dickhead" and you figured it fit you.
It's not a free pass. Something doesn't have to be propaganda to be bad.
I didn't say it did? I didn't even say that propaganda is universally bad?
Sure, but propaganda has to have intent. The article itself cannot be propaganda without it. It may advance a claim of COVID being trivial, but those who advance it must bend the article in some way. What they say then is the propaganda.
The choice of what to publish at all, is intent. News outlets are not just firehoses of all facts. They choose what to publish.
There is no need for the article to be "bent" in any way.
So to you propaganda is a synonym for news, and that is simply incorrect.
No. Not a synonym. But the line between news and propaganda is not clear-cut. Especially in the case of a self-contained article. A news outlet may serve as a source of propaganda, based on the editorial decisions they make. The individual articles are still news, even as they serve as propaganda for their audience.
You've kind of arrived at the point while ignoring it.
Propaganda requires intent. You are correct that we can't know their intent directly, therefore we can only use evidence to try to determine the authors intent.
Admittedly I did not pick the article a part, but I saw no tell-tale signs of propaganda. It was primarily interviews with doctors. I saw no signs of manipulative wording, attempts at persuasion, or unsupported opinions of the writer.
While I can't definitively say this article is not propaganda, it probably isn't.
So it's not propaganda until you can provide good evidence that it is.
So your own comments here are propaganda? If everything published by choice is propaganda, then everything is propaganda, because everything is published by choice. Nobody just dumps a bunch of rocks on the keyboard and publishes whatever it types out.
No, they think propaganda influences opinion, but I don't think anything they've said has changed anyone's mind about anything.
There will always be outliers in any population distribution, your wife being one it seems. This is talking about the general outcome now.
There is a ton of, "COVID is mild now" propaganda which is not supported by the science. More evidence points to increased immunity than a reduction in the lethality of the virus itself.
Omicron is less severe than Delta, but that's really misleading because Delta was the most dangerous variant.
I’m not sure you know what propaganda means
There is more than just one strain in circulation
There's a lot of different strains going around, but it's a bunch of different subvariants of Omicron.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions
I think what they are trying to say is that harsh reactions are becoming less common. Which is good for everyone. Although it can still affect people a lot, like it affected your wife.
Although it could be propaganda, at this moment I hope it’s the former.
I just wouldn't want people to get the impression that it's nothing, or that it's like a common cold. My wife is really happy to be alive. I was really scared of losing her.
What sort of propaganda do you think this would be?
An effort to downplay the risks we are under in order to avoid a panic or shutdown like before during a bad economy?
One idea, I don't know, I'm sure there are other possibilities, I'm wasn't thinking of anything specific.
I feel like the comments are dragging you unnecessarily. Maybe one variant presents mildly, but the first line says hospitalizations are increasing. Is hospitalization ‘mild’?
The article contradicts its core premise in the first line.
The core premise is that the "common" symptoms follow a different pattern than they used to. The common symptoms are not the ones that have ever sent anyone to hospital. Hospitalization can still be up and not refute that point.
At the risk of sounding argumentative: The byline of the article says that COVID has gotten milder. The first line of the article says hospitalizations are on the uptick. I feel it’s a bit downhill from there.
I don’t disagree with the premise. As soon as it became clear that COVID was a pandemic and not something that could be quarantined out of circulation, epidemiologists and armchair experts alike have supposed that COVID would become milder. (It’s not evolutionarily advantageous for a virus to be too deadly to its host organisms. That’s sort of a self-limiter.).
I think a milder, more cold-like (or perhaps indistinguishable from cold) COVID may be the ultimate outcome.
That said: To get more into it - I don’t like the article because it appears to contradict itself and it doesn’t account for the same sorts of things that the guy I responded to was being criticized for - variants, vaccination status, immune systems, and anecdotes.
The one bit of real science in it is a paper published in April 2022. And while I’m sure the scientists who wrote that paper did fine work, their research was weeks or months old by the time the paper was published.
That means the only information referenced in the story that isn’t an anecdote is over a year and a half old - published only a few months after Omicron was even recognized as a COVID variant.
And I guess that’s my main issue. It’s a non-story. It asserts something it doesn’t validate. But the commenter asserted something they can’t validate either (to us), and folks dragged him for it.
For what it’s worth, 3 people I know, and myself recently experienced symptoms similar to what OP described. My doctor and a PA at an urgent care both said something to the effect of those symptoms being on the rise. Not saying I should be more trusted but I have a contradictory experience to the article.
If we’re going to be critical of people who have no reason to be misleading, then perhaps we should also be critical of folks who are trying to serve us advertising.