Telling the difference between a developing case of the flu, a cold or COVID-19 is even more difficult than before, as more distinctive symptoms such as the loss of taste or smell have become less common over time, experts say.
It’s fall again, bringing Canadians brightly coloured leaves, hot lattes, grey skies – and a whole lot more sniffling and coughing.
“People are describing it as their cases are more cold-like in that sense, which, unfortunately, makes it more difficult to distinguish from typical kind of upper respiratory tract infections that we see at this point in the year,” Chagla, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor at McMaster University, said.
Moriarty runs a team which has been tracking COVID-19 levels across Canada as provincial and federal reporting became less frequent. She said that while the number of COVID-19 infections are lower “than it’s been for a lot of the Omicron period,” they’re seeing increases in hospitalizations and deaths.
We use the term ‘cold’ as a catch-all for mild infections of the nose and throat that cause symptoms that are not too severe and can be dealt with at home. Common symptoms are a runny or stuffy nose, sore throat, cough, sneezing and general muscle aches. Sometimes a mild fever may accompany a cold. Instead of trying to figure out if their cough is just merely part of a cold, experts say Canadians who are feeling under the weather should always try to stay home if possible to mitigate the potential spread of viruses while they recover.
He said that while this symptom is still around, it’s “much, much less apparent than we saw in 2020,” when this symptom was considered one of the predominant symptoms. Now, it’s a “minority of people that have it,” he said, but those that do have this symptom as part of a respiratory illness can be pretty confident that it’s a case of COVID-19.
“In the general population, COVID has a much bigger impact. So even right now, for example, the estimated number of deaths that are occurring, hospitalizations that are occurring for COVID are still nine to 10 times higher than what we would expect for influenza.”Playing symptom detective won’t be able to give you the answers that testing will, but it’s harder to get your hands on a test these days, Chagla said.