You Can’t Make This Up: Doctors Are Now Struggling to Differentiate Between Covid, Allergies, and Common Cold – ‘We Only Knew It Was Covid Because We Tested’
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Medical professionals are finding it increasingly challenging to distinguish between Covid-19, allergies, and the common cold.
Gone are the days when the loss of taste or smell and a dry cough were the telltale signs of Covid-19.
According to Dr. Erick Eiting, vice chair of operations for emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Downtown in New York City, the symptoms have shifted.
“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,” he shared with NBC News.
He mentioned that a sore throat usually appears first, followed by nasal congestion.
Eiting admitted that the only reason they identified it as COVID was due to the testing; otherwise, it would have been mistaken for a mere cough or cold.
“The only way that we knew that it was Covid was because we happened to be testing them,” Eiting said.
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So, when it comes to who is being hospitalized now with symptoms being reportedly milder, the CDC says that the 80% increase in weekly average was largely contributed to by those ages 75 and up, followed by babies six months and younger and adults ages 65 to 74.
The U.S. is currently recording approximately 19,000 Covid hospitalizations per week, according to the CDC.
The CDC reported that since January, most people hospitalized for Covid had not received a bivalent booster dose of the vaccine.
Still, cases have continued to decline over the last two years, and a recent study published this month found that the drop in Covid rates began once the omicron variant became the dominant strain of the virus.
Researchers in the study shared that they did not know if milder disease contributed to the trend or if it was caused by population immunity.
The Zoe COVID Symptom Study, which collects data on self-reported symptoms in the U.K., has also documented this trend. The study suggests that a sore throat became more common after the Omicron variant became dominant in late 2021. Loss of smell, by contrast, became less widespread.
The study used data collected from the ZOE app, which tracks symptoms reported by individuals who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. The study focuses on two specific time periods: one when the Delta variant was
Source: The Gateway Pundit
