In a statement Monday, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Omicron Variant Symptoms: How New COVID Variant Might Differ From Previous Cases You're just not going to know, especially at the beginning of an illness, what kind of illness you have.
And while there are some parts of the Venn diagram like taste, loss of taste and smell. For many people, those symptoms are overlapping. You're not going to know the difference between those if you just look at your symptoms. "Influenza or even common rhinovirus causes most of our common colds in the winter. "The trick is you're not going to be able to tell the difference between omicron, delta lambda, plain COVID from the beginning," Landon said.
Still, doctors say the best way to determine if you have any form of COVID is to get tested. You certainly can't get that back in 24 hours, and it's only done by specialized labs." You have to do this thing called sequencing, which takes a lot longer. "They're not on which kind of in order to figure out the exact strain of COVID. Emily Landon, infectious disease specialist and chief hospital epidemiologist at University of Chicago Medicine. "When you get a COVID test they're just looking for whether or not you have COVID," said Dr. The process to determine the variant, experts say, is more complicated than that. “And we still have good tools to help combat it.Getting tested for coronavirus won't tell you whether or not you have the new omicron variant. “If you are someone, or live with someone, who is particularly high-risk, I think caution is warranted,” Lessler said. In the meantime, there are still helpful precautions that people can take against the virus, such as vaccines, masking and rapid tests, Lessler said. “That’s a value judgment that’s not an epidemiological judgment.” With such a scenario, policymakers and the general public should have a conversation about “how much death we are willing to tolerate” and how much “to spend to prevent death and go from there”, Gounder said. “All indications are that we are settling into a flu-like world where the virus continues and continues and continues to evolve and immune escape and that we are going to have repeated epidemics because of that,” Lessler said. The new strain just appears to be part of “an evolving virus”, Lessler said.
A doomsday covid variant driver#
There is also greater immunity against the virus among the general population, which is the “biggest driver of changes in severity and how the virus impacts people”, said Justin Lessler, an epidemiology professor at the University of North Carolina. The Covid vaccines also appear to protect well against the variant, Schaffner said. The Arcturus strain is not a “variant of concern” because “although it’s very contagious, it does not appear to be more severe” than other variants, said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Life has also continued to gradually return to normal, with most people no longer wearing masks in public spaces. The number of Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths has steadily declined since January, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. “The concern is that if you cry wolf every time there is a new variant – when there is really not cause for heightened level of concern – you are going to lose credibility with the general public.” “It’s like the boy who cried wolf,” said Dr Celine Gounder, an epidemiologist and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News. The strain is likely more communicable than other recent variants, and people should “take the same sensible Covid precautions to help avoid infection”, the report states.īut the variant should not prompt concerns about a return to earlier stages of the pandemic, according to infectious disease experts. In late April, the Los Angeles county public health department issued an alert stating that people infected with the XBB.1.16 strain, nicknamed “Arcturus” on social media, “could be more likely to experience conjunctivitis as a symptom of their Covid infection”.
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