Got COVID? Your symptoms may depend on your vaccination status

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is really starting to adjust.

Now that it has settled down among humanity for a long time, researchers have found that the symptoms it causes have become more and more like those of the flu, colds, and even allergies.

Among the vaccinated, this trend has become particularly pronounced. But even when the unvaccinated are infected, they often report a set of generalized symptoms that can pass for one of several other common infections now on the rise in the United States.

The latest update comes from Zoe’s Health StudyCOVID-19 symptom tracker developed researchers from Harvard, Stanford and King’s College London. The findings reflect the symptoms reported by users of the Zoe COVID Study over the past few weeks. app in the United Kingdom, where new cases of COVID-19 have been reported. ticking ominously upward.

For example: sneezing is now a very common symptom of COVID-19 and is increasingly being reported by vaccinated people.

This appears to be part of the change in COVID-19 symptoms caused by Omicron variantsaid Dr. John O’Horo, an infectious disease physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Omicron infections cause more upper respiratory symptoms than infections caused by earlier variants, which are more likely to lead to pneumonia and other lower respiratory tract infections.

These days, O’Horo said, “I don’t think it’s really possible, by the initial symptoms of patients, to distinguish COVID from what we’ve long called ‘flu-like illnesses.’ This means that coronavirus tests will be an important tool to distinguish between flu and COVID-19, he added.

Continued testing will also help the CDC monitor the progress of COVID-19 and clear the way for coronavirus patients who are at risk of becoming seriously ill to be referred for antiviral and other treatments.

Since the early days of the pandemic, fever, cough and shortness of breath have been considered common symptoms of COVID-19. A few months after the start of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added chills, muscle pain, headache and sore throat.

Patient apps and websites soon brought CDC’s attention to loss of taste and smell, as well as rarer symptoms such as “COVID fingers” and “COVID toes,” two examples of rashes that are sometimes the only sign of a patient’s illness.

Zoe Health’s new update on common symptoms of COVID-19 highlights the most notable changes in reports of people who received at least two doses of the vaccine before becoming infected. For this group, dyspnea, which had been in the top five for a long time, was downgraded to the 28th most commonly reported symptom. The loss of smell is now gone. 6 is still quite common. Now there is no fever. eight.

The new symptom rating for people who received at least two doses of the vaccine is as follows:

1. Sore throat
2. Runny nose
3. Stuffy nose
4. Persistent cough
5. Headache

Sneezing as a symptom of COVID has been reported from people who received at least one dose of the vaccine. But those who remained unvaccinated rarely reported sneezing.

However, the set of symptoms reported by the unvaccinated did not differ radically from those reported by people who were fully vaccinated but did not receive a booster. For the most part, they just appeared in a different order:

1. Headache
2. Sore throat
3. Runny nose
4. Fever
5. Persistent cough

And for those who received only one shot, sneezing made the list instead of a fever or stuffy nose:

1. Headache
2. Runny nose
3. Sore throat
4. Sneeze
5. Persistent cough

In the United States, online apps that tracked COVID-19 symptoms over time never gained much popularity due to political suspicion and privacy concerns. Embal ShahamProfessor of Behavioral Health and Science at St. Louis University College of Public Health and Social Justice.

Shahem and her colleagues have developed one such app, and Google and Apple have also launched one each. But their use has been limited by the fact that collecting symptom data has been secondary to the main design of the apps to help with contact tracing.

This has deprived researchers and public health officials of important information about how the coronavirus infection unfolds and how that clinical picture has changed over time, Shaham said. Doctors have a clear understanding of the clinical pathways that critically ill patients follow as they are under observation in hospitals, but mild to moderate illnesses, which account for the majority of COVID-19 cases, are less well understood.

“We could get a lot more information about when people had symptoms, how they changed over time, how people’s experiences varied,” she said. “We really could know a lot more, and in real time, than we do.”