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Colds Are Back. What Does That Mean for Your Chance of Catching Covid-19?
It may seem scary that colds are spreading again. But it’s more complex than you think.
Last week, on my kids’ fourth day of in-person school, I came down with my first sore throat in six months. At first, I downplayed it — it was just allergies. Then I panicked and had to take a Xanax. Then I thought: How the heck could I have gotten sick? My kids and husband seemed perfectly healthy, and other than their school, which was being held entirely outside, the riskiest place I’d been over the past two weeks was the Walmart parking lot — once — to pick up curbside groceries.
My most pressing concern, of course, was whether I had Covid-19. Looking up the symptoms, I wasn’t reassured. On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists 11 possible coronavirus symptoms (including sore throat), then warns that this seemingly exhaustive list “does not include all possible symptoms.” A systematic review of 16 studies published in July concluded that no symptoms are common enough to distinguish Covid-19 from other infections, including the common cold.
Covid-19 “ranges from everything from just a cough to just a headache to just the sniffles to fever plus cough plus sniffles — the whole permutation and combination spectrum is there,” says Ian MacKay, PhD, a virologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. Without a Covid-19 test (which, like any test, also isn’t 100% accurate), I couldn’t distinguish whether my sore throat was an allergic reaction to ragweed or the infamous infection that has so far killed more than 200,000 Americans.
I’m better now — and much, much calmer after two negative Covid-19 tests. But I am not the only one baffled — and concerned — by the burgeoning spread of colds this autumn. This past spring and summer, colds and other respiratory viruses were down by a lot due to lockdowns, but things seem to be creeping back toward a more sniffly normal. The other day, I took to…
