The omicron variant continues to soar throughout the country, but it’s getting harder to distinguish the variant compared to the common cold and other COVID-19 infections.
Dr. Robert Quigley, the senior vice president and global medical director for International SOS, a leading medical and security services company, told me that those infected with the omicron variant “tend to show symptoms much quicker than that seen with other variants.”
- “For the majority of individuals who are vaccinated and boosted and have contracted the omicron variant, they have experienced mild symptoms consistent with an upper respiratory tract infection,” he said.
Quigley said the top omicron variant symptoms to look out for include:
- Cough.
- Fatigue.
- Congestion.
However: For the unvaccinated, Quigley said that symptoms might be more severe.
Similar: Dr. Carole Freiberger, a physician at Saint Luke’s Critical Care, told the Kansas City Star that she has seen fully vaccinated people experience minor symptoms similar to the common cold with the omicron variant.
- “You know when you get a really bad cold, and you feel lousy, and there’s mostly the upper respiratory-type symptoms is more what we’re seeing now,” Freiberger said.
- “As opposed to when the original and the delta variant were raging, we were seeing a lot more high fevers, cough and body aches, those were the main top three symptoms you would see.”
A recent series of new studies suggests that the omicron variant limits its infectiousness to the body’s upper airways rather than the lower respiratory area, according to WebMD.
- “It’s fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging,” Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, told The New York Times.