This is an empirical datum found at a clinical level. It may be due to the increased incidence of infections now in the young population, where the immune system is generally stronger.
Are Covid Symptoms Changing ? By now everyone knows which are the most common ones: fever, cough, sore throat, weakness, fatigue and muscle aches, sometimes even loss of taste and smell. Severe cases can present with pneumonia. The official website of the Ministry of Health, updated on April 8, summarizes them : “The symptoms of COVID-19 vary based on the severity of the disease, from the absence of symptoms (being asymptomatic) to presenting with fever, cough, sore throat , weakness, fatigue and muscle pain. Severe cases can present with pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and other complications, all of which can be life-threatening.
Sudden loss of smell (anosmia) or decreased sense of smell (hyposmia), loss of taste (ageusia) or altered taste (dysgeusia) have been recognized as symptoms of COVID-19.
Other less specific symptoms may include headache, chills, myalgia, asthenia, vomiting and / or diarrhea ‘. However, subtle changes in symptoms were observed over the months.
A study carried out in the United Kingdom between May and December 2020 of 19,000 people, published in the British Medical Journal , found that 40% of patients did not have one of the three symptoms considered classic: fever, persistent dry cough or loss of taste and smell, even if flu-like syndromes remain the characteristic of Covid-19 . However, persistent fatigue was frequently observed in the course of the disease, underlined Claudio Cricelli, president of the Italian Society of General Medicine (Simg), and also a low fever and “there are fewer patients with coughs”, added the Simg vice president, Ovidio Brignoli. The variants of Sars-CoV-2, according to studies, including a recent one from the Lancethowever, they did not show evidence of different symptoms. Therefore the symptoms now described could depend on the target population.
Young people, among whom the coronavirus is now more widespread, tend to have a stronger immune defense, develop milder forms and generally manifest flu-like symptoms, while few cases worsen into pneumonia, which instead is very more frequent in elderly patients. As the number of young patients grows, symptoms associated with the milder form tend to occur, moreover “in a few months – explained Cricelli – we will no longer see the elderly hospitalized because they will be largely vaccinated.. At the beginning of the pandemic, the symptoms that guided us to identify Covid were fever, cough, breathlessness. At the beginning of the disease, patients now report a general feeling of malaise, headache, nausea and, more rarely, diarrhea.
In some areas, the temporary loss of taste and smell seems to have reduced, again on the basis of clinical observation, while gastrointestinal symptoms such as abdominal pain, vomiting or diarrhea appear to be increasing, which in any case have been reported in association with the disease from the beginning internationally and nationally and are still reported on the website of the Ministry of Health . Percentage, 5-10% of infected people manifest gastrointestinal symptoms but in hospital Covid wards the percentage of those who complain of these symptoms rises to 30%. In this season, however – doctors warn – there could easily be over-infections, or the gastrointestinal symptom may not be correlated with Covid.
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