What are the symptoms of Covid-19? A test is the only way to be sure.
The days when a fever was a dead giveaway for COVID-19 are long gone. Covid symptoms differ greatly amongst individuals due to the virus's mutations and subsequent resurgence of infections.
As the nation experiences another summer wave of Covid, doctors emphasize the difficulty of diagnosing the illness based solely on symptoms.
“Every week, we test someone for Covid who I didn’t think had it, and they test positive. Then we have others who I’m pretty sure have Covid who test negative,” said Dr. Steven Furr, a family physician in Jackson, Alabama, and president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.
“It’s really hard to separate Covid from any other respiratory illness right now,” he added.
According to Dr. Furr and other physicians, Covid patients are presenting a wide range of symptoms.
“Some people have a very classic sore throat, runny nose, cough, and low-grade fever,” said Dr. Paul Sax, clinical director of the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “In others, it’s mostly nausea and diarrhea with very minimal respiratory symptoms. It can vary from A to Z and beyond.”
Dr. Bernard Camins, medical director for infection prevention at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, has observed the same trend.
Without a test, “you can’t tell nowadays whether it’s a cold or Covid,” Camins said.
As of mid-June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Covid infections were rising in 39 states, with increases in Covid-related emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths.
The diagnostic landscape has changed significantly since 2020, when fever was a strong indicator of Covid.
“That’s not really a major sign anymore,” Furr noted. “Now, there’s no one symptom where you say, ‘Hey, you probably have Covid.’ Without a test, we’re not going to know for sure.”
This change is due to several factors. Most people’s immune systems have been exposed to the virus multiple times through vaccination, infection, or both.
“That appears to ameliorate the severity of the disease over time,” Sax explained. “Recurrent infections are typically milder than first-time infections — not always, but usually.”
Additionally, the virus itself has evolved. The latest Omicron subvariants — KP.3, KP.2, and LB.1 — are highly contagious but generally cause milder illness. LB.1, in particular, can infect more easily due to a single deletion in a spike protein, according to a CDC spokesperson. However, there is no evidence that LB.1 causes more severe disease.
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration advised vaccine makers to target the KP.2 strain for this fall’s Covid shots. A CDC advisory panel is set to discuss who should receive these updated vaccines, likely recommending them for those most at risk of complications: older adults, the severely immunocompromised, and people with underlying conditions.
ax mentioned that many current Covid hospitalizations involve individuals with chronic illnesses, such as congestive heart failure, which Covid exacerbates.
Determining when to test and isolate can be challenging given the variety of Covid symptoms and the potential for false negatives if tests are taken too early.
“We still have cases who test negative on initial testing and test positive a day or two later,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease fellow at Stanford Medicine in California. He explained that this happens because “
0 Comments