Your ‘summer cold’ could likely be COVID-19, doctors say amid surge

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COVID-19.“I thought, ‘Really? It’s summer,'” the marketing and communications professional said in an interview from St. Catharines, Ont.About a week later while camping, Robin woke up with a sore throat and felt achy later in the day.

She thought it was “a summer cold.”“It never even occurred to me that perhaps it was COVID,” she said.When she returned home a couple of days later and was still not feeling well, she decided to take a rapid antigen test, which was positive.Since then, Robin’s partner and his family, as well as some of her friends and co-workers in both Canada and the U.S., have all had COVID.“Almost every day I’m hearing about someone else who has it or knows someone who has it,” she said.That because “we’re in the midst of a summer wave of COVID,” said Dr. Andrew Pinto, director of the Upstream Lab, a public health research team at St.

Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.In addition to wastewater data that suggests an “upward trajectory” in COVID-19 activity, Pinto said he is seeing more patients with the virus in his family practice clinic.”One of the really unique things about COVID is that it is surprising us in ways that other respiratory pathogens haven’t,” he said.“It is spreading even in the absence of very cold dry air with lots of people indoors, which we normally see with respiratory pathogens like influenza and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus).”Dr. Fahad Razak, the former scientific director of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, said coronaviruses have historically spread year-round and don’t follow a seasonal pattern.Since COVID-19 is still relatively new, we don’t have the population immunity built up that we do for flu and RSV, which have been around for a long time, said Razak, who is