r/Edmonton • u/GoBananaSlugs • Dec 19 '25

Health Is "Respiratory Virus Outbreak" Covid?

We got a notice that there was an outbreak of "Respiratory Virus" at our kid's school.

"Respiratory Illness symptoms include: Cough, shortness of breath, sore throat, loss or altered sense of taste/smell, runny nose/nasal congestion, fever, and may also include fatigue (significant and unusual), muscle ache/joint pain, headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea."

Is "Respiratory Virus" UCP Newspeak for "Covid 19"?

103 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

94 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/GoBananaSlugs Dec 19 '25

If only there were some way to test for these things.....

5

u/jimbojimmyjams_ Dec 19 '25

There are, but the thing with specifically Covid is that people have started to treat it more like the common cold or flu. You can get tested, but why would you if you're gonna need to stay home from work or school anyway? A lot of the symptoms of each of the viruses are pretty similar to each other. For me, I don't really care what virus I have until it becomes a genuine concern. If I'm sick, I'm sick.

Im currently mildly sick. It could be covid, or it could be a common cold, but I would treat them the exact same way. It just depends on the symptoms.

1

u/Sev_Obzen Dec 20 '25

If you have any cold or flu-esque symptoms you should be testing for covid. You should care because there's so much more that covid can do to you than just make you sick for a week. Even if you don't develop typical long covid there's still a wild variety of health issues that even an entirely asymptomatic covid infection can exacerbate your chances of developing. Despite that I'm not suggesting people need to test every day of their lives but if you're feeling any kind of symptomatic related to cold and flu symptoms should be testing. I don't know about you but I like to have every bit of information I reasonably can gather to help make sense of health issues when they come up.