As the BA.5 COVID-19 variant becomes dominant, making up 80% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., according to USA Today, President Joe Biden announced that he is positive for COVID.
Biden reports that his symptoms ─ a runny nose, fatigue, and an occasional dry cough ─ have been mild. A new study reveals that as COVID-19 variants mutate and evolve, so do the common symptoms. A recently updated Zoe Health Study conducted in the U.K. found that symptoms of the current omicron variant are predominantly a sore throat and hoarse voice. This was true in both vaccinated and unvaccinated patients. As the BA.5 variant takes hold, experts are tracking the common signs and symptoms of this highly contagious omicron variant.
According to CBS News, people with an omicron variant were less likely to be hospitalized compared to those who became infected with the earlier delta variant. Symptoms also lasted for shorter periods — an average of 6.87 days, compared to 8.89 days.
While delta was better at infecting the lungs, omicron is definitely more transmissible but affects fewer organs, according to Zoe Health.
In the most recent week, 29 states reported more cases than the week before and 20 states had more deaths than a week earlier. BA.5 has new mutations that distinguish it from other omicron subvariants, such as BA.1 and BA.2, but in general causes similar symptoms as its predecessors.
These symptoms include congestion, headaches, cough and fever. But experts say that infected children are also suffering from more gastrointestinal symptoms, like nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, says Dr. Claire Bocchini, an infectious disease expert in Houston, TX. She’s also seen more cases of the upper airway infection croup in kids infected with BA.5.
“Certainly this is an infection to pay attention to for parents of children because while most children don’t require hospitalization, a few do,” Bocchini said.
According to Insider, A U.K. general practitioner was surprised that she and her family were reinfected with BA.5 just 12 weeks after their initial infection with omicron. Dr. Claire Taylor’s 9-year-old son complained of a stiff neck and his fever hovered around 102 degrees Fahrenheit. “First thought was meningitis,” she said. But healthcare experts say that the issues omicron presents are not typically comparable to meningitis. Neck stiffness is not a common symptom seen with BA.5.
“You can get myalgias — muscle aches that make you not feel well — but it’s less specific to neck stiffness, more just general body aches,” says Dr. Julianna Burns, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Stanford Children’s Health in San Francisco. “Diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, loss of appetite — that can be a manifestation in kids.”
While some people don’t have any symptoms with BA.5, those who do can expect to feel sick for a few days and up to a few weeks.
“It varies on a wide spectrum,” says Dr. Mobeen H. Rathore, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and a professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Bocchini added that the normal course of illness with BA.5 is “one to two weeks of acute symptoms,” but people who are hospitalized may suffer symptoms for much longer, according to USA Today.
While the data is limited on whether you can become reinfected with the BA.5 variant, health experts say you are probably protected for at least a month after infection. But as we have seen from previous variants, that protection wanes and it is possible to get reinfected with the same variant two to four months after infection.
As our population builds up immunity to the highly contagious variant, it’s unlikely to keep spreading in the next few months. A more likely scenario, says Dr. David Dowdy, associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is that new subvariants of omicron will emerge as the wily virus learns how to bypass that immunity and infect as many people as possible.
He says it’s a “bit of a cat and mouse game between the virus and our immune systems. If we don’t see another subvariant emerge from the next couple of months, then yes, absolutely people will be reinfected with BA.5”