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.
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.