Many people who are sick from Covid-19 are not showing symptoms that are very different from that of the seasonal flu this time. Doctors say most people with Covid are coming to them with complications like fatigue, persistent longish cough, body aches, and some abdominal discomfort.

“In present times when multiple viruses are doing the rounds across the city, there is not one specific symptom that can help us to differentiate. Thankfully, the number of Covid-19 cases are currently few. The symptoms are mainly cold, cough, fever, runny nose, muscle aches, and headache. Occasionally patients also develop vomiting and diarrhea. The previous hallmark seen with earlier Covid-19 variants was the loss of sense of smell and taste, which is rarely seen now,” said Anita Mathew, infectious disease specialist, Fortis Hospital Mulund.

Even as parts of the country continue to see an uptick in the number of Covid cases, the good news is that the variant is not attacking the lungs. According to an expert at the apex network of laboratories monitoring genomic variants of the disease, the newly detected XBB 1.16 sub-variant could be driving the surge in India.

Anurag Agrawal, former head of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), the laboratory consortium, and chair of the WHO’s technical advisory group on virus evolution believes that “from what we have seen so far it won’t be very different from previous Omicron lineages”.

Many patients are finding themselves Covid positive on their own home antigen test. Some of those coming to the hospital are people with multiple medical comorbidities, elderly patients, diabetic patients, patients with heart disease, asthma, lung problems or they come to the hospital for some other reason and get detected positive, said Sandeep Budhiraja, group medical director, Max Healthcare, and senior director at its Institute of Internal Medicine.