Katherine Wu, staff writer of The Atlantic, writes in a recent article with a headline: Is COVID a Common Cold Yet?. This is because, after two years of pandemic spread and increased level of immunity among peoples with vaccines and natural infection, most of the initial Covid-19 symptoms have become much milder.

Summer Chavez, an emergency physician at the University of Houston, told Katherine “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. A strange new virus was colliding with people’s bodies in such unusual ways that it couldn’t help but stand out”.

“Now, nearly three years into the crisis, the virus is more familiar, and its symptoms are too. 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’,” Dr. Chavez added to her.

Based on her interviews with health experts, Katherine writes “The recent trajectory of COVID, at least, has been peppered with positive signs. 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. 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”.

Katherine adds “On the individual level, a sickness that might have once unfurled into pneumonia now gets subdued into barely perceptible sniffles and presents less risk to others; on the population scale, rates of infection, hospitalization, and death go down”.

The article is full of quotes from health experts that Katherine spoke to.