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Cases are expanding in the United States. Here’s what you want to know about how symptoms of an infection can progress.
By Dani Blum
By now 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 infection to infection. The virus seemed like a completely different disease to me when I tested positive: in the first round, the fever crushed me. Once I had virtually no symptoms. The worst infection left me slumped on the couch, so exhausted that I had to strain to pay attention to a podcast.
“No two Covid infections have behaved the same way,” said Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonology and critical care physician at the Cleveland Clinic.
Generally speaking, the more people increase immunity after a vaccination or infection, the milder the symptoms of future 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 is evolving into new variants. If you do 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, Davis. San Diego.
Many symptoms of Covid remain the same since 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 got sick, for example, but this happens less often now. Early in the pandemic, Dr. Khabbaza said, other people told him that their Covid infections were unlike anything they had experienced before. Today, he says, patients think they have a bloodless test and are surprised when they test positive.
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