For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been recorded by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melted snow, the soft rustle of newly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the bat of sneezing and incessant coughing.
The lobby of the building I live in comes alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats. Every time I walk down the street, I suffer seeing teary eyes and red noses. Even my Slack work is littered with sick emojis, the sounds of miserable colleagues asking each other why they feel like utter garbage.. They say “it’s not covid”. “I’ve tested, like, a million times.” Something else, they insist, makes them feel like a stuffed, cooked goose.
that another thing It may be the common cold. After three years largely out of the spotlight, a glut of airway pathogens—among them adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus, pneumoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, common cold coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses—has become atrocious. common once again. And they really do come out of some people. The good news is that there is no evidence that the common cold is actually objectively worse than it was before the pandemic began. The not so good news is that after years of relief from a host of viral annoyances, many of us have forgotten that the common cold can be a real drag.
Once upon a time—before 2020, to be exact—most of us were very, very used to the common cold. Each year, adults are infected with, on average, two to three of the more than 200 viral strains known to cause diseases; Young children may contract a half-dozen or more infections when they go in and out of the germ incubators we call “daycares” and “schools.” Illnesses are especially prevalent during the winter months, when many viruses thrive amid cooler temperatures, and people tend to flock indoors to exchange gifts and breathe. When the pandemic began, masks and distancing sent many of these microbes into hiding—but with mitigation easing in that time since then, they’ve started a slow crawl again.
For the majority of people, this isn’t really a big deal. Symptoms of the common cold tend to be very mild and usually resolve on their own after a few days of being bothersome. The virus sneaks into the nose and throat, but is unable to do much harm and is quickly cleared. Some people may not even notice they’re infected at all, or they may mistake the illness for an allergy — dizziness, lightheadedness, and not much more. Most of us know the workout: “Sometimes it’s just a matter of being congested for a few days and feeling a little tired for a while, but other than that you’ll be fine,” says Emily Landon, MD, an infectious disease physician at the University of Chicago. As a culture, we have long been accustomed to dismissing these symptoms as Just cold, It is not enough of an inconvenience to skip work or school, or wear a mask. (Spoiler: The experts I spoke with were adamant that we should all be doing these things when we have a cold.)
The general dogma of infectious disease has long been that the common cold is no big deal, at least compared to the flu. but Better than the flu Not saying much. The flu is a legitimately dangerous disease that takes hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, and like COVID, it can sometimes cause people to develop long-term symptoms. Even if colds are generally less severe, people may end up completely battered by headaches, fatigue, and sore throats. Their eyes will tear out. They will clog their pockets. They’ll wake up feeling like they’ve swallowed serrated razor blades, or like their heads have been pumped full of fast-hardening concrete. It is also common for cold symptoms to last more than a week, and sometimes two weeks; The cough, in particular, can linger long after the runny nose and headache are gone. At its worst, the common cold can lead to serious complications, especially in the very young, the very old, and those with immunocompromised conditions. Sometimes, cold patients end up developing a bacterial infection at the top of the Their viral illness, and it’s a one-two punch that could warrant a trip to the emergency room. “The fact of the matter is, it’s a pity I caught a cold,” Landon told me. “And that has always been the case.”
As far as experts are aware, the average severity of cold symptoms has not changed. “It’s about perception,” says Jasmine Marceline, MD, an infectious disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. After skipping a cold for several years, she told me, “It’s now feeling worse than usual.” Honestly, this was kind of an issue even before COVID came on the scene. “Every year, I have patients call me ‘the worst cold they’ve ever had,’” Landon told me. “And it’s basically the same thing they got last year.” Now, though, the disaster could be worse, especially since the brain The epidemiologist is beginning to urge people to scrutinize every sniff and cough.
There’s still a chance that some colds this season could be more annoying than usual. Many of the people who are getting sick right now are just coming off bouts of COVID, the flu, or RSV, each of which infected Americans (especially children) by the millions this past fall and winter. Their already damaged tissues may not be as good against another attack from a cold-causing virus.
It is also possible that immunity, or the lack thereof, plays a small role. Many people are now catching their first cold in three or more years, which means that population-wide vulnerability may be higher than it normally is at this time of year, accelerating the rate at which viruses spread and potentially making some infections more serious than they otherwise would be. on him. Otherwise. It’s unlikely that higher-than-normal sensitivity would cause unsightly symptoms en masse, says Robby Bhattacharya, an infectious disease physician and microbiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Not all cold-causing viruses leave a good immunity—but many of those that do are thought to trigger the body to build up relatively permanent defenses against really severe infections, lasting several years or longer.
Plus, for many of the viruses circulating right now, the issue of immunity is very much moot, Landon told me. So many different pathogens cause the common cold that a recent exposure to one is unlikely to do much against the next. A person can catch half a dozen colds in a five year time frame and not experience the same thing He writes of the virus twice.
It is also worth noting that what some people classify as The worst cold they’ve ever had It may actually be a more dangerous virus, such as SARS-CoV-2 or the influenza virus. Rapid home tests for coronavirus often produce false negative results in the early days of infection, even after symptoms have started. Although the flu Can It is sometimes distinguished from the common cold by its symptoms, which are often very similar. Diseases can only be definitively diagnosed with testing, which can be difficult to obtain.
The pandemic has directed our perception of disease into the wrong binary: Oh no, it’s covid or Phew, it is not. There is no doubt that COVID is still more dangerous than the common cold — and is more likely to cause acute illness or chronic, debilitating symptoms that can last for months or years. But the ranges The intensity between them overlaps more than the duo would suggest. Plus, Marceline points out, what’s really “just” a cold for one person may be an awful load of weeks for another, or worse—which is why, no matter what turns your face into a mucus factory, it’s still important to keep germs at bay. to yourself. The current outbreak of the common cold may not be more severe than usual. But there is no need to make it larger than it needs to be.
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