Shower thought ... Maybe everything else is mutating, too?
My two roommates and I just finally got over some kind of weird cold-like illness, took us 11-12 days to recover. Not Covid (based on 1 negative PCR test for one of us; I'm assuming we all had the same thing). Presumably, just your random cold/flu-type bug. A remote co-worker (400 km away, both of us in EU) has been experiencing a similar illness for over a week now, still not over it.
It took the three of us almost 2 weeks to get over it. The symptoms kept changing every 1-2 days (sore throat, then harsh cough, then chest/lung pain, then gas and intestinal issues, then headache, then back to coughing); had a false "I'm all better now" moment halfway thru, then Phase 2 kicked in. On top of which, I don't get sick much, and when I do, it's usually very mild and I'm over it very quickly.
So, I have a hypothesis. Thanks to all of the social distancing, OCD hand-washing, masking, etc for the past 18 months, "regular" colds/flus/germs have probably been going through some pretty extreme evolutionary stresses, just like Covid ... and are probably mutating/evolving a lot, just like Covid. Except all the researchers and specialists are pretty much completely preoccupied with Covid research/work, so no one has been paying much attention to all the other day-to-day respiratory illnesses.
I've seen a fair bit of news about how colds/flus have been much less common of late, due to the Covid-precautionary measures, but I have not seen any research or discussion about how those measures might be impacting other non-Covid illnesses.
Thoughts?
I've been getting flu shots for over a decade, now. This is because I saw my dad, who otherwise seems to have a somewhat healthy immune system and hardly ever gets sick, spend like 6 weeks recovering from a "harmless" flu. That was in the mid 00s. Constant fever, better for 3 days, then back to being too weak to get out of bed. A constant drag. 12 days of sickness is absolutely normal for the "real" flu as it has been around forever. It's rarer than the some cold where you have a fever for 2 days and recover, but it's absolutely how it works, no grand super-mutation necessary (although, yes, it mutates every year, that's why you need yearly shots).
Don't underestimate the common flu.
There's also just our immune systems re-adapting to being around people.
After being almost completely isolated for over a year, we visited with my inlaws whom had recently been fully vaccinated. Neither of our families bad been sick for over 2 weeks.
We all felt like crap the next day. Not feverish or other cold symptoms, just a general cruddiness. We've also had similiar experiences with others we've interacted with afterwards.
And it never really happened again with anybody we would see again in less than 3 months.
I suspect it's just due to the biological differences in our home environments, which when mixing together results in an adjustment period.
It's also possible it was covid, and the one test missed it. To me, a single test between three people doesn't sound conclusive.
Everything else is mutating all the time, that's why there's a new flu shot every year.
You'd actually expect them to mutate less in this scenario, if they're infecting fewer people and therefore have fewer opportunities to reproduce. Environmental stress can drive evolution, but if a virus can't spread, that's more than stress; it's just going to die and fail to pass on any genes at all.
What likely is going on is that all the social isolation let your immune system get a little too comfortable with your current environment, and once an actual threat worked it's way into your system for the first time in a while, it over compensated.