They tend to cough and produce sputum,” Cassiere said. “Usually patients with acute bronchitis tend not to be short of breath. Hugh Cassiere, the director of critical care services for Sandra Atlas Bass Heart Hospital at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, New York. In that way, the illness may act more like bronchitis than pneumonia, said Dr. Part of the decrease in severity may be because the virus tends not to burrow deeply into the lungs as much as previous variants, but remains higher up in the respiratory tract, experts say. Omicron and its subvariants have, for the most part, caused less fatal infections than previous variants, Meza said, especially compared to what was seen with the delta variant and the original strain of the virus. Do the omicron subvariants cause severe illness? Later CDC research found that the updated boosters are more effective at preventing hospitalization than the original booster, particularly for adults ages 65 and up. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in November that the updated bivalent booster was better at preventing symptomatic Covid infections than the original booster shots. This booster also targets the original strain of the virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.Īs of December, the updated booster has been authorized for everyone ages 6 months and older.ĭuring the first omicron wave, the variant caused a milder illness in people who were up to date on their Covid vaccinations. In August, the Food and Drug Administration authorized a new version of the Covid booster that targets the spike protein of both the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants. It’s really more of a subtle difference that you find out after the fact.” Does the vaccine or booster protect against the omicron subvariants? “There really shouldn’t be a big difference in terms that you can tell one from the other. “We assume that the most prevalent variant in the community is the one that they got infected with,” he said. Meza noted that when people are tested for Covid, the tests don’t look for which variant the person has. Doctors urge people who have any cold symptoms or flu-like symptoms to get tested. Still, it is virtually impossible for people to rely on symptoms to self-diagnose an illness. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cleveland Clinic, said symptoms can be vague, similar to what is seen with any kind of flu-like virus. Those symptoms can include congestion, sore throat and changes in taste and smell.ĭr. Armando Meza, chief of infectious disease at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso.

Unlike earlier variants like delta that affected the lungs, omicron and its subvariants tend to cause more upper respiratory symptoms, said Dr. Roy Gulick, the chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian, said typical symptoms of the omicron subvariants include:

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