Coronavirus: Experts predict how COVID symptoms could change in the future

Since the start of the pandemic, Coronavirus has gone through multiple changes with newer mutations and variants. The severity of the disease has also changed with factors like the dominant variant and vaccination status.

Experts are also wondering how the virus may evolve in the future, and shared their knowledge in a recent paper titled 'How are COVID-19 symptoms changing?', published in the journal BMJ.

David Strain, senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School suspects that one of the BA.4 and BA.5 variants “is definitely causing the respiratory illness again . . . We are starting to see COVID pneumonia reappear, although it’s nowhere near as severe as it was in the first instance.”

“I don’t think anyone is expecting it to head back to the lungs. From an evolutionary point of view, the jump to the airways has made it far more transmissible because you can start spreading it sooner. You need lower concentrations of it to become infectious because you are right in the upper airways rather than deep in the lungs. Just breathing and talking is spreading,” Strain added.

Strain warns that even if the lungs may not be severely impacted, COVID can become more serious in different ways.

“The big fear is the disease moving to a more thrombogenic approach,” he said, adding, “We saw that with BA.2. We saw it with the delta variant—that we were getting massive D-dimer rises [indicating] massive clot risk.”


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According to experts, there’s an increased risk of type 1 diabetes and possibly of dementia associated with COVID infection. Previous variants have seen more COVID patients getting heart attacks or strokes as late as 12 months after initial infection. Only time will tell whether it will persist with Omicron’s emerging new variants.

Vaccine status, viral load, underlying medical conditions, and autoimmune disease can affect the severity of the symptoms, said Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Long School of Medicine in Texas. These factors only vary from one person to another.

She added, “Of course, now we have therapeutics that can be started at the onset of symptoms. Access to those therapeutics will affect the severity of the symptoms.”

According to the World Health Organization, following are most severe symptoms associated with COVID:

-Chest pains
-Confusion
-Loss of speech or mobility
-Difficulty breathing