With the appearance of the sub-variants of Sars-CoV-2, the symptoms in infected people also change. In the beginning, the loss of taste and smell was typical of Covid-19, but those affected now suffer more like influenza. Why is still unclear.
Rare loss of taste, more frequent sore throats: According to an analysis by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the symptoms of corona patients have changed during the pandemic. The so-called symptom profile has become increasingly "flu-like" in the omicron variant BA.5 and has approached that of other respiratory diseases, the authors write in the "Deutsches Ärzteblatt".
It is therefore becoming increasingly important for general practitioners to test their patients for corona and influenza in order to be able to treat vulnerable groups correctly and in good time. According to the analysis, cough and runny nose were the most frequently transmitted symptoms across all variants. However, during the omicron wave, the proportion of patients with sore throats increased significantly. The symptom was then in third place with 48 percent. In the wild type and in the delta wave, this value was 27 and 26 percent. The proportion of fever was clearly highest in all variants in children under five years of age and steadily decreased with increasing age.
A typical symptom from the early days of the corona pandemic, on the other hand, has become rarer: In the phase dominated by the wild type, the RKI still registered loss of taste in 23 percent of the cases reported, in the delta wave the proportion was almost the same at 24 percent. During the phase dominated by the omicron type BA.5, it dropped to 11 percent.
For their analysis, the experts examined the data on PCR-positive cases sent by the health authorities to the RKI. They looked at the cases with at least one transmitted symptom in those phases in which a corona variant accounted for more than 80 percent of the strains sequenced. It is unclear whether the altered symptom profile is due to altered virus characteristics, increasing immunity in the population, or both, they write.
