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Comment by hereforphone | Hacker News Reader

I've been traveling internationally over the past couple of day. Every person seems to have the sniffles, or to be coughing. I haven't noticed this since covid began, presumably because the masks, sanitizer use, and social distancing have kept the cold and flu down.

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Here in the UK there seems to be some sort of cold that is ticking all the same symptom boxes as Omicron (sore throat, headache, nasal congestion, cough) but “isn’t Codiv”. My whole family had it before Christmas. I would describe it a rotten cold, we all sat on the sofa for like 5 days but weren’t bed bound, tested negative with LFTs the whole time (each did one at least every other day for a week). We isolated anyway.

We know a lot of people who have had this experience in the last month. Most people seem to have had this cold or Covid recently.

Now, I am suspicious that something is going on here. I have a suspicion that the LFTs are not testing positive for relatively mild Omicron. The LFTs procedure here, which we followed, has been to only swab the nose (they changed it maybe over the summer?) but I have seen many anecdotal reports over the last week of people who tested negative (LFT) with just a nasal swab but positive if they swabbed their throats. This potentially ties in with reports that Omicron mostly affects the throat whereas Delta affects the back of the nose. I have seen no official studies.

It would not surprise me if we find out in a few weeks/months that nasal LFTs have a very high false negative rate with Omicron.

Edit:

Just found this about a small study suggesting exactly what I am suspicious of:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/health/covid-rapid-test-o...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v...

I had this and so did my friend and we live across the country. The same symptoms at different times. It was as you describe and my cough was terrible, unlike previous colds or chest infections. I coughed for about 40 hours straight and didn't sleep. I tested myself multiple times.

I found it strange that I am boosted, masked, and sanitized, plus I am isolated as I am an unpaid carer for a family member with poor health and I managed to catch the bloody cold!

It seemed suspect to me as well but of course, anecdotal.

Same experience and suspicions here with December being miserable for the household but no positive LFTs (around 3 each) or PCR (one each). Wife still has a sore throat every night, weeks later, and mine lasted weeks too, which is unlike any cold we've had previously.

There's a recent study(0) that suggests that saliva tests are more reliable than nasal swabs for detection of Omicron variants, whereas the inverse was true for the Delta variant.

(0) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268246v...

One of my friends tested positive for covid yesterday (via PCR test). He suspected he might have covid so he had been doing LFTs in the days leading up but kept coming up negative. Out of interest he did an LFT after he got his positive PCR and, surprise surprise, negative.

Obviously this is very anecdotal and speculative, but like you said, I wonder if LFTs don't pick up this strain of the virus as well as previous, and if that is what is causing the numbers to be so high since I would imagine it is how most people test.

Michael Mina explains it this way:

> Rapid tests do work with omicron. "But why are some people staying negative in the first days they have symptoms??" This is expected. Symptoms don't = contagious virus This is literally a reflection of the fact that vaccines are doing their job!

https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/14720244576403947...

There's a nice diagram with additional information there, and further discussion on other possible factors contributing to the results we're seeing.

Mina's tweets are all over the place, and mostly speculation. It's also strange that he's arguing that the vaccines are working in one breath, and then basically telling people to retest daily if possible and go into isolation the minute they think they're going to sneeze in another breath.

The cold is a minor annoyance to most people's immune system, as almost everyone has prior exposure to cold-causing viruses, but colds still manage to spread. We don't test obsessively or quarantine for "the cold."

If "Symptoms don't = contagious virus", how in the world is the virus spreading at such a blistering pace? Is Mina suggesting that literally everyone is getting this thing, including in highly vaccinated populations, by magic? Occam's razor, combined with basic knowledge about how respiratory viruses work, tells us that people who have symptoms are very likely contagious. They might also be contagious before noticeable symptoms arise, and as they subside.

As for viral loads, with Delta, research found that vaccinated individuals were capable of having viral loads as high as unvaccinated individuals[1]. Until there's data about the viral loads with Omicron, it seems dubious for Mina to suggest that the reports of rapid tests failing to pick up omicron infections are related to low viral loads.

Instead, Mina's 5th tweet is worth paying attention to:

https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/14723880511462645...

There is a lot of chatter about how people are getting positive rapid tests when they swab their throats instead of their nasal passages. It's anecdotal at this point, but if we're going to engage in speculation, this seems a much more valid form of inquiry.

The vaccines are very effective at reducing the risk of hospitalization and death, and Omicron seems more mild to begin with. It is very effective at spreading in vaccinated populations, which isn't surprising given that the decreasing size of the SARS-CoV-2 naive population means that the virus is now under pressure to select for immune escape. It's strange to me that a "Epidemiologist, Immunologist, Physician" would tweet as if he didn't know this.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2074

The official guidence is that LFT are only to be used if you DO NOT have symptoms. If you have symptoms you should instead be getting a PCR (lab) test.

Official guidence:

> There are different tests you can get to check if you have coronavirus (COVID-19). The test you need depends on why you're getting tested.

> The 2 main tests are:

> PCR tests – mainly for people with symptoms, they're sent to a lab to be checked

> rapid lateral flow tests – only for people who do not have symptoms, they give a quick result using a device similar to a pregnancy test

> Both tests are free.

Source: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/testing/g...

Well, the symptoms according to the NHS are fever, cough and loss of smell/taste. If you have runny nose and sore throat, you don't have coronavirus symptoms. Technically. So you take a LFT, right?

That was my interpretation.

It confuses me how different the rules and "truths" are all over the world.

At least when I caught Delta I had a sore throat and a runny nose to start. That was it for a couple of days.

There was an outbreak in my children's school so the family went to get tested.

It was only after that I got a cough and fever (and positive result). It wasn't until about day five I noticed I couldn't smell.

Public health where I'm at says basically everything is a possible Coronavirus symptom. They list headache, sore throat, runny/stuffy nose, congestion, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting and/or diarrhea, inability to smell, and pink eye.

Just stating the obvious (but not necessarily true): could be that before covid you never really never thought about others sniffles/coughing, but now after covid, everyone who behave "sick" becomes noticeable. I certainly noticed this in myself.

Went to a new years party in California and a dozen of us got stuffy noses and a small cough. Test came back negative. Haven't had a cold in so long I had almost forgotten what they were.

Before getting the results I had assumed this was the mutation everyone would get as we leave the pandemic with a natural immunity to this weak strain.

I stay inside most of the time and don't really go out or travel or anything. Only time I leave the house is to walk the dog.

It does seem like that past month or so I've been hearing constant sniffling, coughing, and sneezing as I walk around the neighborhood.

This was said in some Covid HN threads 1.5+ years ago when Covid began. We know now it was mostly people noticing stuff they didn’t notice before. Likely the same case here

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