With the virus largely getting relegated to smaller portions of the body, the pathogen is also purged from the airway faster and may be less likely to be passed to someone else. As SARS-CoV-2 has found a tighter anatomical niche, our bodies have become better at cornering it. “Disease is really going to differ based on the compartment that’s primarily infected,” says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a virologist at St. Vaccination and prior infection can both lay down protections that help corral the virus near the nose and mouth, preventing it from spreading to tissues elsewhere. But experts told me the accumulation of immune defenses that preceded and then accompanied that variant’s spread are almost certainly doing more of the work. Many of these changes roughly coincided with the arrival of Omicron in the fall of 2021, and part of the shift is likely attributable to the virus itself: On the whole, Omicron and its offshoots seem to prefer infecting cells in the nose and throat over those in the lungs. On average, symptoms have migrated higher up the airway, sparing several vulnerable organs below disease has gotten shorter and milder, and rates of long COVID seem to be falling a bit. The recent trajectory of COVID, at least, has been peppered with positive signs. Read: What does it mean to care about COVID anymore? Maybe, just maybe, we’re nearing the level of cumulative exposure at which COVID gets permanently more chill. have been vaccinated multiple times, some even quite recently with a bivalent shot many have now logged second, third, and fourth infections with the virus. A glance at the landscape of American immunity suggests that such a plateau could be near: Hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. The severity of COVID will continue to be tempered by widespread immunity, or so this thinking goes, like a curve bending toward an asymptote of mildness. Growing immunity against the coronavirus, repeatedly reinforced by vaccines and infections, could eventually tame COVID into a sickness as trifling as the common cold or, at worst, one on par with the seasonal flu. That trajectory has been forecast by many experts since the pandemic’s early days. “We are moving toward a cold-like illness.” Longer, weirder, more serious illness still manifests, but for most people, SARS-CoV-2’s symptoms are getting “pretty close to other viruses’, and I think that’s reassuring,” Spector told me. More people are weathering their infections with their taste and smell intact many can no longer remember when they last considered the scourge of “ COVID toes.” Even fever, a former COVID classic, no longer cracks the top-20 list from the ZOE Health Study, a long-standing symptom-tracking project based in the United Kingdom, according to Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London who heads the project. And several of the wonkier ones that once hogged headlines have become rare. Today’s most common COVID symptoms are mundane: sore throat, runny nose, congestion, sneezing, coughing, headache. Put three sick people in the same room this winter-one with COVID, another with a common cold, and the third with the flu-and “it’s way harder to tell the difference,” Chavez told me. Now, nearly three years into the crisis, the virus is more familiar, and its symptoms are too. A strange new virus was colliding with people’s bodies in such unusual ways that it couldn’t help but stand out. Patients would turn up with the standard-issue signs of respiratory illness-fever, coughing, and the like-but also less expected ones, such as rashes, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and loss of taste or smell. Sometimes, the symptoms of COVID got so odd, so off-book, that telling SARS-CoV-2 from other viruses became “kind of a slam dunk,” says Summer Chavez, an emergency physician at the University of Houston. Tests were hard to come by too, making diagnosis a pain-except when it wasn’t. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the worst things about SARS-CoV-2 was that it was so new: The world lacked immunity, treatments, and vaccines.
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