Why do I almost never catch colds anymore?
Something I'm wondering about: since COVID, I just don't seem to get colds anymore.
Before COVID, I recall that I very regularly had some kind of minor cold – it felt like it was about 50% of the time, realistically let's say maybe 20%? But of course that's just my recollection.
I then caught the original strain of COVID in March 2020, and suffered fairly badly from it for 3 weeks – definitely the worst illness of my life, though I was very lucky not to need to go into hospital. Since then I've had 3 doses of the COVID vaccine, and had COVID at least twice more, both times very mildly.
Since then though, I've noticed that I almost never have any sort of cold any more. I think my partner and I had some kind of brief minor flu back in September, but I've not had anything since, and I remember thinking that it had been a long time since I'd had anything like that.
For reference, I don't wear a mask nowadays, or otherwise do anything much different to my life before COVID.
Does anyone have any thoughts on why this might be?
Uneducated theories on my part:
- Somehow having COVID made me less likely to catch colds
- Somehow having the COVID vaccine made me less likely to catch colds
- During COVID I got used to holding my breath around people coughing, and that's surprisingly effective towards not catching colds
- I'm now mostly around people less likely to pass on colds for some reason
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, especially those who have some actual knowledge about this topic!
Try having kids and you’ll see how resilient your immune system really is.
Also there’s just generally less crowding and more sanitation than there used to be. There’s still hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere and people are way more habituated to washing their hands. A lot of people still work from home or have hybrid schedules so there’s less people rubbing up against each other in public leading to illnesses spreading around. Restaurants and stores still have some of the health protocols in place for people handling food.
Yup. After we started sending my kid to daycare, I spent about 75% of the next 3 months sick with one thing or another
Even with kids, after that initial burst of first entering school, I'm noticing much less and milder reactions to sickness.
Used to be I was 90% sick between like September and March. Now it's maybe 30%.
I wager on top of what you mention, the proliferation of Hybrid/Remote work has resulted in people actually staying home when they or their kids are sick. This reduces exposure dramatically. People only having a handful of sick days results in people dragging all sorts of studf around unless they feel like death.
How long did that take you? My first year of teaching has seen me getting sick often. I even got an infection not too long ago.
About a year for first child, 3 months for second.
I wager as a teacher expect two or three.
The daycare blues do scale down a bit when they're there for longer and ramp back up with the elementary illnesses.
That is unless your daycare does drop-in care for elementary school kids on school holidays. Then you get sudden infusions of new contact as a bunch of kids from random elementary schools all over the area all pop in for a day or week to create a fresh melange of contagions by combining germs from each of their respective Petri dishes every month or two.
Oh and live in a city where like 70% of people in your income range have jobs that require frequent work-related travel. So parents can go to other states or countries and bring their exotic germs back to their children to share with the class.
Also it’s become part of the Western culture now to wear masks when you’re sick which wasn’t the case pre-pandemic, which was mostly seen as an East Asian thing.
Lol, I was coming here to say the same thing.
I used to be healthy AND fit
Given the consistency, it’s possible you were experiencing allergies instead of colds.
(This is coming from someone who gets to play the fun game of “Is It Allergies, a Cold, or COVID?” pretty much constantly.)
This is a good point, some illnesses also take a really long time to get over. I had strep throat on and off for over 3 years, haven’t gotten it since.
Now that we're all spreading anecdotal stories here :-): I had COVID 3 times (that I know of), and have been on average way more sick (including colds) since. So, the opposite experience here.
I also have been having more stress, so that's probably the real cause. Maybe you've been having a healthier work/life balance?
Seconding this - I pretty much never used to get whatever random things were going around, had COVID several times (including a really nasty case the first time, even after vaccination), and nowadays it seems like I'm continually getting colds and coughs and generally feeling a bit gross.
It's actually a really frustrating and noticeable change that I've been trying to figure out how best to deal with. Now that you mention it I've also been dealing with a lot of stress, so perhaps that does also have something to do with it, and it sounds like a good thing to focus on improving either way.
There’s a decently supported hypothesis out there that getting a bad COVID infection seems to un-train your immune system so it stops recognizing many viruses that it used to be able to identify and respond to before. It’s basically like our anti-virus has been reset to factory settings and forgot how to find the weak spot on a bunch of stuff it used to be able to speedrun through.
Huh, that'd absolutely fit with my experience! It's good to know that there's at least some evidence of a link there, thanks for that. I should do some more reading around this, get a better picture of what the current state of knowledge is - don't suppose you happen to have any good article links you've seen on the topic?
Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2 | The BMJ
I think this one does a decent job of looking at how scientists are rethinking the idea of immunity debt which is that people were being underexposed to common pathogens during covid and they supposed the increase in infections was for that reason. But now they're thinking that there are some similarities to the impact on T-cells between covid and measles.
Much appreciated, thank you! That was in equal parts illuminating and worrying - it definitely does slot neatly into my experience of the last few years, although I'm trying to resist falling too much into confirmation bias, especially on something I can't actually do that much about here and now. It'll be good to keep an eye on the topic now that I know it's one to be watched, either way - partly because it's good to be informed, partly because it's good to have some indication it's likely not my imagination.
Yeah it's hard to say for any individual, you certainly could ask a doctor about titers for your immunizations for example and that could give you some idea of what's going on with your immune system specifically!
I don’t have a link but I just remember a hypothesis floating around that “Long COVID” might be a result of COVID resetting the immune system in a way that allows previously infected but dormant viruses, like Epstein-Barr, to pop back up. Hence why the symptoms seem to be so broad and inconsistent from case to case.
Not a scientist so my random guesses would be:
Interesting observation! I feel like I too get way fewer colds than I did before covid, but in my case it's probably because I also drink 99+% less than I did before covid. Maybe something like that is a factor for you too - do you live a more healthy lifestyle now?
Even if you're not doing much different than in the past, other people are. WFH, better handwashing practices, and any amount of mask wearing in public when someone might be sick all contribute to how many points of contact there are for any given illness. Even if only a small percentage of people do each of these things, it adds up. If one sick person wears a mask and doesn't infect anybody else, that potentially stops dozens of people from getting sick.
The R0 of the common cold is 2-3. That means that if you have a cold, you'll probably give it to 2-3 people, and they will each give it to 2-3 other people, and so on. In 3 generations of the virus, it will probably infect up to 27 people. If you wear a mask and/or stay home and instead infect zero people, then you've effectively stopped 3 direct contacts, and an uncountable number of indirect contacts, from getting sick.
Incidentally, this is why sick leave is important, but also a good business policy. If your sick employees stay home, then they can't get your other employees sick. If you "make" them come in, then eventually all the other employees will get sick as well.
Anecdotally, other than a couple bouts of Covid in 2020/21, I also got sick a lot less frequently (though I now work from home, so that's a more obvious contributing factor). Then I had a kid, and now I'm sick all the time.
COVID is related to many viruses that cause colds and exposure to a pathogen can sometimes improve your response to similar pathogens in the future through things like cross reactive immunity and trained innate immunity. There is also some evidence that extra iteration can happen after an illness that can improve response to future mutations. Additionally, the more severe the illness the harder your immune system will work to protect you against future versions, and the longer it will remember. That's one reason why vaccines use adjuvants.
I also get fewer illnesses than before covid. In fact, I think I've only been sick 3 times - recently with a fairly major something (10 days of 102F fever), once with something my husband brought home after being on a work trip, and once with covid (earliest, August 2020, extremely mild and never tested positive). My husband has gotten sicker much more often than me. I rarely catch what he has. May or may not be correlated, but he gets vaccinated less (he forgets to make an appointment). I'm in public much more often, but also more isolated when I'm in public (big open office, very socially distanced except for one coworker). So I don't know. Maybe people who are sick are staying home and/or masking more in my environs, and it makes a difference?
It means you probably don't have kids or is around kids often.
I've similarly experienced a noticeably lower rate of getting colds/coughs post-Covid. I also never got Covid as far as I know. I've gotten the vaccine but even years when I didn't get a booster have been like this. And it can't be allergies in my case, as I've both had testing for relevant common respiratory allergens that turned up negative and haven't changed my lifestyle in any way that would cut down on mh exposure to a hypothetical allergen, so in my case it definitely can't be the "it's just allergies" explanation someone offered in another comment.
I'd mostly chalked this up to cultural changes due to Covid, like people generally standing further apart and occasionally even still wearing masks, but it may be some other factor. I also started getting normal flu shots alongside my Covid boosters, which can't have hurt in my particular case.
I've rarely gotten sick since covid as well, with the only cases that were significant enough for me to notice (e.g. actually have symptoms) having been a nasty 5-7 day head cold thing which I'm pretty sure I picked up at a theme park, and later some kind of gut upsetting thing which I think I might've gotten from drinking coffee/tea on an airplane.
In my case I think it comes down to contact with others having been cut down to a tiny fraction of what it had been as a result of the shift to remote work, but I've also been getting covid boosters and flu shots so maybe that factors in too.
My siblings who are parents get sick quite a bit, I get sick seasonally with either a) allergies to something I have no idea what or b) the college students breathing my air.
Anecdotally the parents always claim there's mold in the vents because their kid "has been sick since getting to school." (We do check for mold, the vents are gross sometimes in an old building sort of way, but not moldy). I am not allowed to tell them that their kid is doing the pre-school "new people" thing all over again, except they're also staying up late, going to parties, sharing cups, making out, and not washing their hands enough and yeah, the suburbs kid has a Chicago cold and the Chicago kid has a cold from here and I get a Naperville cold because thanks. (It was worse when I lived in the halls myself but I'm still in the metaphorical germ splatter zone.)
But I can and do take time off when I'm sick - and if it's a lingering cough I'm in my office with the door shut. And there's hand sanitizer around still. Things are better than pre-covid on that front