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Covid-19 is a virus that can cause a range of symptoms, most commonly a cough and a fever. But people with a weakened immune system are more likely to become seriously ill from it.
If you catch Covid-19, there are treatments you can take to reduce your risk of serious symptoms. You can’t buy Covid-19 medication online currently, but you can get it from your physician if you’re eligible for it.
Covid-19, sometimes called coronavirus or just ‘Covid’, is a type of virus that caused a global pandemic in 2020. The main symptoms of the initial variant were a cough and loss of sense of smell and taste, with many people developing more serious flu-like symptoms including fatigue, and severe breathing problems. Since 2020, Covid-19 has been responsible for millions of deaths worldwide, with an estimated mortality in the USA reaching as high as 1.1 per 100 confirmed cases.
The virus has caused fewer deaths since mass vaccination programmes were rolled out. Later variant strains such as Omicron have been less virulent, causing fewer hospital admissions and deaths. Treatments have also been developed for the virus, which work by stopping viral cells from replicating themselves in the body. These can help to speed up the time it takes to recover from the virus, and make it less likely that you’ll get severe symptoms or complications.
Anyone can get Covid-19, although how different people respond to the virus can vary. It’s been estimated that 20% to 40% of people who get the virus are asymptomatic. Hospitalisations due to Covid-19 in the United States have varied between 2 and 45 people per 100,000 infected.
People with pre-existing medical conditions, weakened immune systems and the elderly are more likely to be hospitalized with Covid. Severe symptoms and hospitalization also disproportionately affects people of color, and it’s been theorized that this is partly due to health inequalities.
Case rates of Covid tend to fluctuate, because different variants of the virus emerge and pass through the population in waves. In the USA, Covid-19 cases reached a peak in January 2022, with 5.6 million confirmed cases in one week. This was equal to around 1.6% of the total population. Since then, confirmed cases have become much less common, ranging from approximately 100,000 to 1,000,000 per week.
There are several factors though that could cause current case rates to be lower. Herd immunity means that more people are likely to have asymptomatic cases of Covid, or only develop mild symptoms. Without moderate to severe symptoms, people with the virus may be less likely to go for testing.
During the height of the pandemic, more testing was taking place too, because workplaces and travel and leisure companies required it. But more recently, because more recent variants of the virus aren’t as pathogenic or dangerous as previous variants, testing isn’t as widespread.
The first cases of a virus that would later be identified as SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) were reported on December 31, 2019 in Wuhan, China. Three weeks later, the first recorded case in the United States was reported on January 20, 2020.
Social restrictions came into force sporadically in different parts of the country. The first of these to be declared was in New Rochelle, New York, on March 12, 2020. when authorities announced a containment area. By the end of March 2020, several states including California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and Oregon had issued stay-at-home orders.
How we source info.
When we present you with stats, data, opinion or a consensus, we’ll tell you where this came from. And we’ll only present data as clinically reliable if it’s come from a reputable source, such as a state or government-funded health body, a peer-reviewed medical journal, or a recognised analytics or data body. Read more in our editorial policy.
Covid-19 is the name given to disease caused by a coronavirus strain called SARS-CoV-2. It’s sometimes referred to as ‘coronavirus’, but this is a more general term that’s used to describe the group of viruses SARS-CoV-2 belongs to. It’s not known for certain how the virus began, but it’s been theorized that it originated in bats, and later mutated to affect humans. . Once it had mutated and transferred to humans, it began to spread quite easily through the population and had reached most of the world within three to four months.
The virus that causes Covid-19 can be transmitted through airborne droplets (so breathing in droplets that come from an infected person’s nose or mouth when they cough, sneeze or exhale) or from contact with droplets on surfaces (touching an object that contains droplets from an infected person, and then transferring the virus to your body by touching your face, nose or mouth).
You're more likely to catch Covid-19 from an infected person if you’re indoors together, or in close proximity to them.
The easiest way to catch Covid-19 is to have close contact with one or more infected people, in an indoor setting. If you don’t wash your hands regularly, especially before eating or touching your face, then you’re more likely to pick up the virus from infected surfaces and ingest it. If an infected person you come into contact with isn’t wearing a mask, this can make transmission easier too.
Not being vaccinated against the virus makes you more susceptible to the virus, and increases your chances of having more serious symptoms if you catch it.
So, to lower your risk of Covid-19, it’s important to:
The most common symptoms of Covid-19 are:
But you might also have:
Covid-19 symptoms can vary from one person to another, and sometimes different symptoms for a specific variant (like Omicron or xbb 1.5 for example) may be more common.
Serious cases of Covid-19 can progress to pneumonia, which can cause lasting tissue damage in the respiratory tract and potentially be life-threatening.
The duration of Covid-19 symptoms can vary, depending on how severely someone is affected by the virus. People who only have mild symptoms may recover within 7-14 days. But people who require hospitalization may need weeks or even months to recover fully.
Some people who have had the virus have also reported long-term symptoms after the infection has passed. This is known as ‘long Covid’. We still don’t know much about the condition, but symptoms may include:
Because long Covid is a new condition, it’s not clear yet how long these symptoms may last for.
Not everyone who gets Covid-19 will have symptoms, so it’s easy to have the virus and not know. It’s been estimated that between one and two in every five people with Covid-19 will be symptomless.
You may be more likely to have asymptomatic Covid-19 if you’ve been vaccinated, but besides this, it’s not fully understood why some people develop symptoms and others don’t. Although people with compromised immune systems or pre-existing medical conditions are more likely to develop serious symptoms, some people who are otherwise healthy do become seriously ill with Covid-19 and require hospitalization.
Some studies have suggested an association between risk of infection and blood type, but more research needs to be done to determine what might make someone more or less likely to be become infected, or develop severe symptoms.
How we source info.
When we present you with stats, data, opinion or a consensus, we’ll tell you where this came from. And we’ll only present data as clinically reliable if it’s come from a reputable source, such as a state or government-funded health body, a peer-reviewed medical journal, or a recognised analytics or data body. Read more in our editorial policy.
How we source info.
When we present you with stats, data, opinion or a consensus, we’ll tell you where this came from. And we’ll only present data as clinically reliable if it’s come from a reputable source, such as a state or government-funded health body, a peer-reviewed medical journal, or a recognised analytics or data body. Read more in our editorial policy.
Mortality Analyses. [online] Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
Agent-based modeling and phylogenetic analysis suggests that COVID-19 will remain a low-severity albeit highly transmissible disease.
A common allele of HLA is associated with asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nature, [online] pp.1–9.
Global Percentage of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections Among the Tested Population and Individuals With Confirmed COVID-19 Diagnosis. JAMA Network Open, 4(12), p.e2137257.
COVID Data Tracker. [online] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Coronavirus in African Americans and Other People of Color. Johns Hopkins Medicine. [online] 20 Apr.
WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. [online] World Health Organization.
First Cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the WHO European Region, 24 January to 21 February 2020. Eurosurveillance, 25(9).
First Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the United States. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(10), pp.929–936.
Statewide COVID‐19 Stay‐At‐Home Orders and Population Mobility in the United States. World Medical & Health Policy, 12(4).
COVID-19: An Insight into SARS-CoV2 Pandemic Originated at Wuhan City in Hubei Province of China. Journal of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology, [online] 6(4).
The association of ABO blood group with the asymptomatic COVID-19 cases in India. Transfusion and Apheresis Science, 60(6), p.103224.
Waning of vaccine effectiveness against moderate and severe covid-19 among adults in the US from the VISION network: test negative, case-control study. BMJ, [online] 379, p.e072141.
Real-world use of nirmatrelvir–ritonavir in outpatients with COVID-19 during the era of omicron variants including BA.4 and BA.5 in Colorado, USA: a retrospective cohort study. The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Treatments for COVID-19. [online]
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