The symptoms of the common cold are typically a stuffy head, the sniffles and body aches.

Now, this season, there’s a new one: panic.

As the latest coronavirus variant races through recently reopened offices, holiday parties and family gatherings, signs of an ailment that was once an annoying winter perennial — eased with bed rest and chicken soup — now set minds racing. In New York City, the slightest sniffle has people canceling holiday plans and packing coronavirus testing centers, where in recent days lines have stretched for blocks.

Is it a cold? Or is it Covid?

With new information that the highly contagious Omicron variant can penetrate two vaccine shots and a booster, it has become emotionally upending to feel under the weather, New Yorkers say.

“Having other ailments in the middle of a pandemic feels almost like an insult,” said Tal Lavin, a 32-year-old author from Manhattan, who has taken three at-home coronavirus tests — all negative — since she came down with an apparent cold last week. “I have thought so much about this disease for the past two years that any potential brush with it feels a bit monumental.”

Many cannot shed overwhelming anxiety in the face of Covid, a pathogen that has killed more than 800,000 Americans — even when tests and retests have shown that they actually have a more mundane illness.

Despite receiving negative tests, some people keep burning through at-home coronavirus swabs just to stay calm. Others with in-the-clear test results and drippy noses say they are still secluding or masking even at home until the sneezing stops — just in case.

The worry is particularly intense because last year, many people had fewer colds and flus: Behavior changes and measures put in place to quell the coronavirus also reduced the transmission of other bugs. This season, as Zoom social hours and virtual school have been replaced with in-person parties and classrooms, the flu and other bugs are slinking back, according to public health officials.

When vaccination began last winter, there was a bullish belief in the vaccines’ near-total protection that has since given way to a grim new understanding: Wily strains of coronavirus can still break through, though vaccination greatly reduces serious illness.

And now, the virus is newly resurgent.

In the Northeast, and New York State, an epicenter when the coronavirus first made inroads into North America in 2020, the positivity rate tripled in just three days last week. On Sunday, New York State reported 22,478 new coronavirus cases, the highest single-day total since the outset of the pandemic, though testing was not as widely available in the first wave last year. Increasingly widespread vaccinations have helped keep hospitalization rates comparatively low. About 1,100 people are hospitalized in New York City now; at the peak in April of 2020, 15,000 people were hospitalized.

Public health officials nationwide are bracing as cases have begun to creep up in most of the country, even as scientists scramble to understand Omicron’s severity, and concern is great about its toll on areas with low vaccination rates.

At the same time garden variety illnesses are on the rise. As social-distancing and masking guidelines and behaviors have relaxed, influenza infections have begun to increase as they usually do this time of year, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Source: NY Times