No need to worry, this is the difference between COVID-19 and the common cold

jpnn.com, JAKARTA – A heart and blood vessel specialist from the Indonesian Cardiovascular Specialist Association (PERKI), Vito A Damay said that despite having similar symptoms, there are a number of things that distinguish the common cold and COVID-19.

So if you actually have a cold or flu, you don’t have to worry about being exposed to the corona virus by other people or parties with certain motives, especially without an antigen test or PCR procedure.

Vito Damay said between COVID-19 and flu generally have the same symptoms of a runny nose, stuffy nose.

But in COVID-19, there is also fever, cough, uncomfortable throat, sometimes also nausea, diarrhea, reddish spots appear on the skin similar to allergies, the body feels weak, tired easily so that the sufferer wants to continue to rest.

In addition, about 87 percent of people with COVID-19 can’t smell the smell of food, their bodies, or anything else or it’s called anosmia. This symptom is experienced by the patient even though his nose is not blocked.

“Even though they both have colds, stuffy noses, runny nose, but COVID-19 usually has symptoms of anosmia or can’t smell the aroma or loses the sense of smell. As many as 87 percent of people with COVID-19 have complaints of anosmia,” said Vito who practices at Siloam Hospitals Lippo Village through a video message uploaded on his social media page, quoted on Sunday.

The cause of this anosmia is not nasal congestion or a runny nose, but because olfactory sensory neurons cannot express the gene that codes for the ACE2 receptor protein (which the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses to enter human cells), said a study in the journal Science Advances on July 24, 2020.

As quoted from the official HMS website, one of the researchers, one of the professors of neurobiology at the Blavatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School (HMS), Sandeep Robert Datta, found that the corona virus changed the sense of smell in patients, not by infecting neurons directly but affecting the function of supporting cells.

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