Changes in Symptoms Experienced by SARS-CoV-2-Infected Individuals – From the First Wave to the Omicron Variant

  1. Hansjörg Schulze
  2. Wibke Bayer

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Abstract

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a global pandemic and public health crisis since the beginning of 2020. First recognized for the induction of severe disease, the virus also causes asymptomatic infections or infections with mild symptoms that can resemble common colds. To provide better understanding of these mild SARS-CoV-2 infections and to monitor the development of symptoms over time, we performed a detailed analysis of self-reported symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 positive and SARS-CoV-2 negative individuals. In an online-based survey, a total of 2117 individuals provided information on symptoms associated with an acute respiratory infection, 1925 of the participants had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection, and 192 had tested negative. The symptoms reported most frequently during the early phases of the pandemic by SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals were tiredness, headache, impairment of smell or taste and dry cough. With the spread of the alpha and delta variants, the frequency of nose symptoms such as blocked or runny nose and sneezing increased to being reported by almost 60% of infected individuals. Interestingly, the spread of the omicron variant brought a sharp decrease in the incidence of impaired sense of smell or taste, which was reported by only 24% in this phase of the pandemic. The constellation of symptoms should be monitored closely in the months ahead, since future SARS-CoV-2 variants are likely to bring about more changes.

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  1. Version published to 10.3389/fviro.2022.880707
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.25.20236752v2 on medRxiv
  3. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.25.20236752: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Data analysis: Data were analyzed using R (version 3.6.3) and RStudio software and fsmb, plyr, splyr, tidyverse, randomForest, patchwork, rstanarm, ROCR, ggplot2, viridis and bayesplot packages.
    RStudio
    suggested: (RStudio, RRID:SCR_000432)
    For graphic representation of the survey results of tested individuals, data were sorted for the SARS-CoV-2 test result, the severity of the SARS-CoV-2 symptoms and the severity of fever using the tidyverse package, and a heatmap of the survey data was generated using ggplot2 package.
    ggplot2
    suggested: (ggplot2, RRID:SCR_014601)
    Random Forest analysis of the survey data was performed using R package randomForest 4.6-14 [10] with default parameters.
    randomForest
    suggested: (RandomForest Package in R, RRID:SCR_015718)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.25.20236752v1 on medRxiv