Did You Catch a Cold, or Is It COVID-19? Doctors Want You to Keep This in Mind!

Did You Catch a Cold, or Is It COVID-19? Doctors Want You to Keep This in Mind!
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Suddenly manifesting symptoms like a sore throat, cough, and runny nose are enough to make people assume that you have COVID-19 nowadays.

However, summer colds are very common, and infectious disease experts believe that we will be seeing more of them this year, mainly because the country is opening back up, and we’re beginning to see people more or less regularly.

Experts know that when people interact, respiratory virus transmission happens more often.

The CDC issued a health advisory for doctors to announce that an increase in cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) was registered, which provokes cold-like symptoms across the southern region of the U.S.

Experts believe that, after a long time of isolation, when our immune systems haven’t been exposed to particular viruses, there is a chance that we will see an increase in summer colds.

Summer colds typically happen when a healthy person comes in contact with a sick one, according to Richard Watkins, M.D., an infectious disease physician and professor of internal medicine at the Northeast Ohio Medical University.

The common viruses that provoke the common cold are coronaviruses (others than SARS-CoV-2), rhinoviruses, and RSV don’t simply go away when the summer comes.

Viruses are more efficient at infesting a host during some seasons (especially the colder ones) than during others, but that doesn’t mean that they go extinct during summer.

Summer colds and COVID-19 are very similar and challenging to differentiate, Dr Watkins mentioned.

He also added that he recommends getting tested for COVID-19 if you have common cold symptoms, as there is no reliable way to tell the two diseases apart at the moment without medical testing.


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Jeffrey likes to write about health and fitness topics, being a champion fitness instructor in the past.

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