Its just a cold

Hmmm.  The first cases of Covid-19 were recorded in the US in January 2020.  By February and March, the political leadership of the nation were in full panic mode with desperate efforts to find and deploy new vaccines in months rather than years.

Skeptics at that time argued that it was much ado about nothing.  That Covid-19 was more than a cold but less than a flu and that it would run its course, becoming milder and less lethal to the elderly as time passed on.  They argued that we did not really need to do anything for the great majority of population.  Acquired natural immunity and natural virus evolution would ensure that something that wasn't much more than a flu would become at most a cold.  

There was a lot of spirited debated about definitions and measures and contested studies that did seem to indicate Covid wasn't near as contagious or lethal for the general population as was being asserted by politicians and the public health institutions.

But the early versions of Covid did scythe down large numbers of the very elderly and some of those with multiple or severe comorbidities.  It was very contagious and dangerous for small parts of the population.  

Travel was curtailed, schools shut, the nation shut down, people forced to mask and required to take experimental vaccines.  The handling of the pandemic was a catastrophe in terms of avoidable deaths, health, and educational outcomes.  The financial catastrophe might have been worst of all.  We are still in recovery from one of the greatest and most sustained examples of bad emergency response and public health leadership.

In the intervening two and three quarter years, Covid-19 has continued to evolve.  Just the way early critics said it would.  Its death rate has gone from low to negligible.  It has gone from maybe a bit worse than a flu to no more than cold.

Now, apparently, it can be confirmed that which was predicted.  From Sore throat, then congestion: Common Covid symptoms follow a pattern now, doctors say by Aria Bendix.  The subheading is Doctors who treat Covid describe the ways the illness has gotten milder and shifted over time to mostly affect the upper respiratory tract.  If NBC is allowed to say it, then it must be true.

Doctors say they're finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish Covid from allergies or the common cold, even as hospitalizations tick up.

The illness' past hallmarks, such as a dry cough or the loss of sense of taste or smell, have become less common. Instead, doctors are observing milder disease, mostly concentrated in the upper respiratory tract.

"It isn’t the same typical symptoms that we were seeing before. It’s a lot of congestion, sometimes sneezing, usually a mild sore throat," said Dr. Erick Eiting, vice chair of operations for emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Downtown in New York City.

The sore throat usually arrives first, he said, then congestion.

The Zoe COVID Symptom Study, which collects data on self-reported symptoms in the U.K. through smartphone apps, has documented the same trend. Its findings suggest that a sore throat became more common after the omicron variant grew dominant in late 2021. Loss of smell, by contrast, became less widespread, and the rate of hospital admissions declined compared to summer and fall 2021.

Doctors now describe a clearer, more consistent pattern of symptoms.

"Just about everyone who I've seen has had really mild symptoms," Eiting said of his urgent care patients, adding, "The only way that we knew that it was Covid was because we happened to be testing them."

That was a lot of forfeiture of civil rights, public money wasted, physical health damaged from closed hospitals, and education loss from closed schools all for something that, as predicted, went away by itself in just over two years.  

Really hard to see anyone in the clerisy or the leadership of the country coming out of this with any credibility.  All the voices who were suppressed, mocked, identified as know-nothing conspiracy theorists - they were the ones most persistently correct.

Seems like there is a lesson in there somewhere.