Sub-Total: €0.00
Is COVID-19 Now Just Another Respiratory Infection?
Dr Sheena Meredith | Disclosures | 09 January 2024
COVID-19 may be assuming its place among the panoply of respiratory viruses, but this is no reason for complacency in a health service still overloaded by winter infections, say experts.
COVID is now “very much an undifferentiated respiratory illness” that can masquerade as any other, Dr Helen Wall, a GP in Bolton, told Medscape News UK. “The picture this Christmas period has been of mass respiratory illness. COVID can literally have any respiratory symptoms, and many others as well,” she said.
Working in a COVID clinic early on in the pandemic, “I could honestly tell 99% of the time it was COVID before the test proved it,” she said. “This has changed now. There aren’t really any symptoms such as lost taste and smell we can look out for anymore that definitely tell us it’s COVID.”
According to the latest extrapolations from volunteer participants in the Winter COVID-19 Infection Study, 4.2% of the population – or 1 in 24 people – could have tested positive for COVID-19 in the week to 13 December. However, only 3% had consulted a GP and only 0.1% were admitted to hospital with a respiratory infection.
Low Public Health Risk From Latest Variant
The latest variant, JN.1, a descendant of the SARS-CoV-2 BA.2.86 lineage first identified in August, harbours various mutations that make it more transmissible, according to laboratory analysis published in The Lancet last week.
However, while the WHO in December dubbed JN.1 a variant of interest, it said that despite a likely increase in cases, any additional public health risk was low. Studies globally suggested no increase, and possibly a reduction, in severity and risk of hospitalisation.
Wall, who is also clinical director of population health for NHS Greater Manchester, pointed out that other than a few who choose to purchase and test themselves, only people sick enough to go to hospital are now getting definitive test results. Most of her patients “are still at home, unsure of what is making them ill”.
COVID “Just Another Respiratory Infection”
Professor Mark Woolhouse, chair of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, agreed that “COVID is now just another respiratory infection”, but stressed “that does not equate with ignoring it. On the contrary, we all need to pay even more attention to respiratory infections than we did before the pandemic”.
COVID is – and will remain for the foreseeable future – “a significant and additional threat to respiratory health in the UK and globally”, he told Medscape News UK. “The burden respiratory viruses impose on our healthcare system has increased, and it’s not likely to fall back any time soon.”
He said that the two settings most vulnerable to COVID are care homes and hospitals. “There is a good argument for maintaining biosecurity and infection control in those settings” to reduce the load on the NHS for both COVID and respiratory infections generally.
“It may be that commitment to such precautions fades away, or it may be that we become more sensitive to biosecurity and infection control for all respiratory infections,” he said. “I work in public health so I favour the latter, but it would involve effort and expense for systems that are already overstretched.”
The changes that might make the most difference lie in societal attitudes to respiratory infections, he said. “If, thanks to COVID, we are all now a little more cautious both about exposing ourselves and exposing others, then this would lower the burden across the board.”
He added: “From observation, many people are taking respiratory infections far more seriously.” How long they will continue to do so remains to be seen, but “it’s quite possible this will be the new normal. I hope so anyway.”
Lead image credit: E+ / Getty Images
Article by, Medscape UK.
