When Covid was first detected in 2019, we were utterly clueless about how dangerous the infection is. Slowly, we understood how the disease spreads and started recognising the symptoms. During the initial phase, the symptoms that we identified as ‘classic’ were loss of smell and taste, fever, breathlessness etc. But, with time, as the virus started mutating and vaccination coverage increased, the signs related to the infection also started changing. Patients started complaining of sore throat, coughing, gut related issue and soon, these started regarded as top symptoms of COVID. And now, experts are of the opinion that COVID symptoms are changing again. Here is all you need to know:
David Strain, senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School, is of the opinion that respiratory illness is making a comeback with either of 2 Omicron variants - BA.4 and BA.5. “We are starting to see covid pneumonia reappear, although it’s nowhere near as severe as it was in the first instance,” he added.
Lung infection won't be severe:
Strain noted, “I don’t think anyone is expecting it to head back to the lungs. From an evolutionary point of view, the jump to the airways has made it far more transmissible because you can start spreading it sooner. You need lower concentrations of it to become infectious because you are right in the upper airways rather than deep in the lungs. Just breathing and talking is spreading.”
Chances of developing blood clots are high:
He, however, pointed out that this doesn’t mean that it won’t become more serious in different ways. “The big fear is the disease moving to a more thrombogenic approach,” he says. “We saw that with BA.2. We saw it with the delta variant—that we were getting massive D-dimer rises [indicating] massive clot risk.”
What other symptoms we might see in the future?
Previous variants have seen more covid patients presenting as much as 12 months later with heart attacks or strokes, and there’s an increased risk of type 1 diabetes and possibly of dementia. Only time will tell if this was a feature of the earlier variants and whether it will persist with omicron
