The cold is so annoying with all that sneezing and the crud feeling, but it's not scary.
Yet, the so-called cold can be a lot of different viruses.
Most people know the cold is a virus. You might have noticed that a cold tends to be slightly different each time you get it. One time focused more on stuffing up your head. Another time more on stuffing up your nose or lungs.
Colds may feel different each time because there are about 200 different cold viruses. One hallmark of the cold is sneezing, something that rarely happens with the flu.
In fact, according to healthdirect.com, colds are broken down into two different categories:
1. rhinoviruses, and;
2. coronaviruses.
Rhinoviruses affect the lining of the nose and throat, causing sore throat, runny nose and sneezing, among other symptoms. They rarely result in fever.
Coronaviruses are not rare. They belong to a huge family of viruses that cause everything from mild colds to Covid-19 (the newly identified virus), and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). Unlike rhinoviruses, these cause fever.
Some coronaviruses also pass between various species of animal to humans. This is evidently how Covid-19, SARS, and MERS developed.
The influenza virus is by far the most common annually in humans and is often deadly. While Covid-19 had infected an estimate 72,000 people worldwide by the end of February, the flu had infected 29 million people just in the U.S. during the 2019-2020 flu season.
Covid-19 killed about 2800 people while the flu killed 16,000 in 2019 and 2020. In the 1918 outbreak of flu (now known to be H1N1), 50 million people worldwide died. But the 2009 outbreak was less serious because precautions were in place.
At the end of February, the death rate from Covid-19 was estimated to be 2% to 3% of those infected. The actual mortality rate had not been calculated by that time. If that rate holds, it would be much higher than the death rate for influenza, but much lower than the rate for SARS (9.6%) or MERS (34%).