So, you’ve got a cold again? You’re not alone, some of us are getting sick for the second time in three weeks...
The sore throat, runny nose, and continuous chesty cough are not only an annoying inconvenience, they’re also some of the symptoms commonly found in Covid cases.
With 333,347 people testing positive for coronavirus in the last seven days, it’s easy to think you’re part of the number too. But many of us (those who still have access to lateral flow tests) are still testing negative on the devices.
It could be that our pandemic bodies have become a lot more sensitive to germs we weren’t exposed to over the last few years.
If you were working from home a lot for example, or curbing your social mixing, or wearing face masks everywhere, you would have been better protected.
But now, as all restrictions have been lifted, many of us are going back to pre-pandemic life with an ongoing pandemic body – which means we haven’t quite caught up.
Dr Peter English, a retired consultant in communicable disease control and past chair of the BMA Public Health Medicine Committee, says we’re reporting more regular illness now for several reasons.
He tells HuffPost: “Firstly, one of the reasons we’re ill could be that it’s actually Covid but we’re just not diagnosing it. We can’t rule out that these colds are Covid, especially with these new variants as immunity is not as good as before and people are getting a lot of re-infections. And we also know that the tests are not 100%. So a negative test indicates it’s less likely to be Covid, but it certainly doesn’t rule it out.”
He adds: “Another thing is, we’re suddenly going out and about without taking precautions like masks, and reaching more people. And so we’re being exposed to all those coughs and flu viruses that we haven’t been exposed to for a couple of years, or had very little exposure to.”
Dr English explains that in the last few years we were protected against colds and flus because they spread in the same ways: “We know that the measures we took to control Covid are also effective against other airborne diseases and flu is airborne but much less infectious so we more or less eliminated flu for a period during the pandemic. And now that people are mixing again, as Covid cases are up, so are all the other common respiratory diseases.”
He advises carrying on wearing masks to places (even though it might not be official government advice, it’s still good practice to observe), as well as regular hand washing and sanitising. You can also incorporate rest days where you’re not socialising as much to limit exposure, slowly building up your tolerance.
And remember, you were also getting colds and flus before the pandemic, we just weren’t as hyperaware of it as we are now.