With a new variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus causing a spike in cases, it is demonstrating just how much the disease has changed since the pandemic began – and what happened to “Covid toe”.
“For almost four years, I’ve managed to dodge Covid-19,” TV broadcaster Mehdi Hasan tweeted a fortnight ago. “But it finally got me. At the end of 2023.”
Hasan added that his symptoms were thankfully mild, but he is just one of many people reporting their first ever positive test for the virus responsible for the pandemic, Sars-CoV-2, four years on from when it first began spreading around the world.
What are the symptoms of JN.1
The version of the Covid-19 virus behind the latest spike in infections shares many of the same symptoms as earlier variants of Sars-CoV-2 : a sore throat, fatigue, headache and a cough.
Differences in the symptoms often depend on a person’s underlying health and their immune system. But some clinicians are reporting some of the most common first signs of an infection by JN.1 are diarrhoea or a headache. Fewer patients are losing their sense of smell with variants closely-related to Omicron, of which JN.1 is a subvariant.
Covid-19 cases are starting to rise again as a result of the JN.1 Covid variant, which appeared last September in France. The variant accounts for around 60% of new infections in early January, according to a data tracker from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).