As reports of milder, cold-like illnesses emerge, experts suggest testing to know for sure.
Questions about whether COVID symptoms are different with Delta compared to previous variants have resurfaced after a Louisiana public health official recently said patients are experiencing milder symptoms.
Louisiana state health officer Joe Kanter, MD, MPH, told a local New Orleans radio station that many COVID patients are now developing symptoms that can be mistaken for other illnesses such as allergies or the common cold.
“You may experience relatively mild symptoms that can easily be mistaken for allergies or something you picked up from your child at daycare, all those things,” Kanter told WWL . “If you have any symptoms, no matter how mild, even if it’s a sore throat, even if it’s a runny nose, even if it’s nasal congestion, get tested and limit your contact with other people until you do.”
While there hasn't been much data on the differences in COVID symptoms with Delta, the idea seems to have originated with the leader of the ZOE COVID symptom study in the UK.
In June, ZOE study leader Tim Spector, MB, MSc, MD, of King's College London, said in a YouTube video that data collected by their app suggests that COVID "is behaving differently now. It's more like a bad cold in this younger population."
At that time, the most common symptoms had changed to headache, followed by sore throat, runny nose, and fever.
"Those aren't all the old classic symptoms," Spector said, adding that coughing has dropped to fifth on the list, and "we don't even see loss of smell making the top 10 anymore. This variant seems to work slightly differently."
Certainly, Spector's report is limited by the fact that it is based on self-reported data and his findings were not part of any peer-reviewed literature; they did not even appear in any preprint publication.
But other experts have acknowledged an increase in anecdotal reports that COVID symptoms are now different from those seen with earlier variants.
David Kimberlin, MD, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, heard those reports, but was cautious in interpreting them.
“I don’t think that, with what we know now, we can conclude that [Delta] is very different in terms of symptoms,” Kimberlin told MedPage Today . “There have been some reports that it causes more cold-like illnesses, but so did the original COVID. I think we’ll know more in the coming months as we have the opportunity to gather the data.”
Purvi Parikh, MD, of NYU Langone in New York City and a spokesperson for the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, has also heard anecdotal reports of mild COVID being mistaken for allergies, but noted that allergies are unlikely to present with features such as high fever, nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea.
Other symptoms that would make allergies unlikely include muscle aches and chills, said Alan Goldsobel, MD, of Allergy & Asthma Associates of Northern California, who is also a professor at Stanford University. Signs that it's just allergies would be the time of year (for those with seasonal allergies), in addition to itching, he added.
It might be more difficult to distinguish COVID from the symptoms of the common cold, Parikh and Goldsobel noted.
"If you're unsure, I recommend getting a COVID test," Parikh said.
Kimberlin agreed, especially for fully vaccinated people who have heard that they may be more likely to have a mild illness if they are indeed infected.
“If you have mild, cold-like symptoms, you should get tested,” especially if you have contact with vulnerable populations such as young children, elderly parents, or long-term care residents, she said. “The best way to protect them is by getting vaccinated and then knowing if we’re infected, even if we’re not getting seriously ill because we’ve been vaccinated.”
From: https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/93997