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Cases are emerging in the United States. Here’s what you want to know about how symptoms of an infection can progress.
By Dani Blum
At this point in the Covid-19 pandemic, most people have had at least one contact with the virus. Those of us who have been inflamed many times (and again) would probably think we know the beginning.
But symptoms can vary from one infection to another. The virus seemed like a completely different disease to me. When I tested positive, in the first round the fever overwhelmed me. Once I barely had any symptoms. The worst infection left me slumped on the couch, so exhausted I had to struggle to pay attention to a podcast.
“No Covid infection has ever behaved the same,” said Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonology and critical care physician at the Cleveland Clinic.
Generally speaking, the more people’s immunity increases after vaccination or infections, the milder the symptoms of the following infections tend to be. But for an individual, there’s no guarantee that a second infection will be less severe than the first.
This is partly because the virus has replaced and evolved into new variants. If you get reinfected, it means the virus has evolved enough to evade your immune defenses, said Dr. Davey Smith, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Diego.
Many Covid symptoms remain the same from 2020: fever, sore throat, cough. But some have changed. It was not uncommon for other people to lose their sense of taste and smell when they became ill, for example, but this happens less frequently now. Early in the pandemic, Dr. Khabbaza said, other people told him that their Covid infections were like nothing they had experienced before. Today, he says, patients think they have a test without blood and are surprised when it comes back positive.
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