With the omicron variant now the dominant strain in the United States infecting the unvaccinated and fully inoculated alike, health experts warn the symptoms that previously helped people to gauge whether they had a cold, flu or covid-19 are no longer the useful marker they once were.
Making risks assessments on whether to travel, gather with others or get tested for the coronavirus based on symptoms “is not going to work anymore,” said Emily Landon, the chief infectious-disease epidemiologist at University of Chicago Medicine.
Complicating matters is that pandemic-fatigued populations must once again revise what they thought they knew about the coronavirus. Health experts said grids and infographics that suggest certain symptoms are particular to one virus or another, which are popular on social media, may have at one point been helpful but are now outdated with the rise of omicron.
In this omicron-dominant season, symptoms of cold, flu or covid-19 are overlapping to a large degree (with the exception of the losing a sense of taste or smell, which remains specific to covid-19).
“The symptoms are now like a Venn diagram where all the circles are overlapping,” said Landon.
