Have I got COVID, or a cold?

Helen Salisbury, GP, discusses the confusion that the winter season brings as people are unsure whether they have a cold or might have COVID

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on The BMJ 

Every year, as the weather turns colder, many patients present to their GPs with symptoms of a respiratory virus. All GPs have a well-rehearsed explanation about why this three day cough accompanied by a sore throat and runny nose is viral, rather than bacterial, and won’t be helped by antibiotics. The routine has been adjusted this year to include an additional question, ‘Have you done a COVID test?’ In most cases the answer is ‘No’ – which is understandable, but also alarming.

The government’s coronavirus website still lists the main symptoms of infection as a high temperature, a new continuous cough, and a loss or change in sense of taste or smell. If you have these symptoms you can order a PCR test for coronavirus. This list hasn’t been revised, even though we know that these aren’t the main symptoms of the delta variant. Headache, sore throat, and runny nose are the three most common symptoms in unvaccinated people, in data collected through the Zoe COVID Symptom study, which has 4.7m people logging their symptoms daily. Fever and persistent cough are fourth and fifth and, in vaccinated people only, one of the original symptoms – persistent cough – makes it into the top five (but only just), being less common than sneezing.

Patients should be forgiven for feeling certain that they don’t have COVID (although some have been described as having ‘Schrödinger’s Cough’ – simultaneously severe enough to need antibiotics, but not bad enough to be COVID). There has been no public messaging stating that these common respiratory symptoms could be caused by coronavirus, despite a much wider range being published in WHO’s case definition nearly a year ago, and numerous subsequent calls for a change in UK government guidance. 

Empower people

If we want to halt the spread of COVID, we need to empower people to recognise when they may be infected and enable them to access accurate testing to find out. If they rely on information based on an outdated and inaccurate case definition, they risk infecting vulnerable people and perpetuating the pandemic by mixing freely at school or work and in public.

On a more personal note, patients are currently being encouraged by the press and our politicians to demand to be seen face-to-face; this puts GPs and their teams at risk, as the screening questions used for possible COVID are likely to miss many cases.

There’s a parallel here with the persisting prominence of handwashing in official messages about COVID precautions (for example, on the UK Health Security Agency’s Twitter feed). Clean hands are a good idea, but fresh air is far more likely to prevent infection by an airborne virus. 

I really want to keep my patients safe, but it feels like an uphill struggle when so much of the information they receive from ostensibly trustworthy sources is misleading.