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.
Is this propaganda? My wife just recovered from covid and it knocked her on her ass. Yes upper respiratory was true, but nausea, fever, fatigue, fainting, body pain, loss of taste all happened
Just because an individual case doesn’t fit the trend does not automatically make the news propaganda.
This article is a bit of propaganda though. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true or anything. But running an article in the news about how much milder the disease is, is still going to have an effect on how people respond to it.
I think you might be using too broad a definition of propaganda. The result of influencing opinion does not make something propaganda. Propaganda needs some intent to persuade or push an agenda.
The article might be propaganda, largely that depends on the motivations for writing and publishing it. But the fact that the content of the article might change people’s opinions does not make it propaganda.
I feel like the comments are dragging you unnecessarily. Maybe one variant presents mildly, but the first line says hospitalizations are increasing. Is hospitalization ‘mild’?
The article contradicts its core premise in the first line.
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.
I think what they are trying to say is that harsh reactions are becoming less common. Which is good for everyone. Although it can still affect people a lot, like it affected your wife.
Although it could be propaganda, at this moment I hope it’s the former.
There is a ton of, “COVID is mild now” propaganda which is not supported by the science. More evidence points to increased immunity than a reduction in the lethality of the virus itself.
Omicron is less severe than Delta, but that’s really misleading because Delta was the most dangerous variant.
There’s a lot of different strains going around, but it’s a bunch of different subvariants of Omicron.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions
Scheduled next boost for next week.
I finally caught it earlier this year. Thanks to vax, it was similar to a cold / flu. Was mostly better after a few days.
Medical science is awesome. I couldn’t be happier about how it turned out. What a relief.
The EMA recommeded it recently. I think that has to filter down into member states now. So for the EU next week would probably be too soon. For Switzerland it’s not approved yet. But maybe in other non-EU countries somewhere?
So is there any real way to say if this is because of widespread vaccination or because the virus itself has lost some lethality genes
Not a scientist, but I’d guess mostly B, maybe helped along with some of A.
The goal of a virus is to replicate, and it does that better when it’s less lethal
Viruses don’t have goals. You are anthropomorphizing them. What viruses do is mutate. If mutations have more fitness, they will spread more effectively. That says nothing about mortality nor morbidity. With this disease it spreads in the early stage, which long before the person who has caught it either dies, recovers, gets long COVID, etc.
Just a very small correction- as with all biology, natural selection will drive a virus to replicate more effectively, that’s it. This does NOT mean a virus will automatically become less lethal over time. That’s an older hypothesis that scientists found was not in line with observation.
The newer hypothesis is known as “virulence-transmission trade-off”. The oversimplification of the idea is that if a mutation increases both transmission and virulence, it will also tend to be selected for. COVID is inconsistent with both hypotheses in certain ways though, so really predicting its virulence in the short or long term has proven difficult. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/
The old idea isn’t wrong per se, lower lethality is a good survival trait. It just has to be weighed against the value of transmission, which would intuitively have a much higher value. In covid, the lethality rate is even less inpactful because it is contagious for a relatively long period before the host would suffer severe illness. But low lethality is still a good thing, and in such a widespread disease one would still expect that trait to become more pronounced eventually. That doesn’t mean it necessarily would, statistically likely doesn’t mean certain, especially if a particular mutation gave it a substantial bump to both traits it may never be selected out for example. But the current trend seems to be a result of this likelihood.
Huh, I have exactly that. Dunno if covid though of just some flu
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. I can’t afford to pay for a test every time I get the sniffles either. Also, America showed me they dgaf a couple years ago, so now I just throw on the mask and go about my business.
That was the basic progression when I had it a few months ago if you add fever and chills.
