Multiple studies have shown that headache can be a symptom of the omikron variant what the Volkskrant reports about. Headaches and fatigue complaints are said to be much more common in South Africa, the country where omikron emerged, than coughs and colds. The same is evident in studies from the United Kingdom and Norway.
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‘Male cat?’
Someone who currently has corona is Henry McMillan from Amsterdam. He contracted it during a New Years Eve party with about ten friends. They all did a self-test beforehand. They were negative, but now all ten guests appear to have corona. “Really unbelievable actually,” McMillan tells EditieNL. “I did not expect it.”
The only complaints he has experienced so far are minor headaches and a little fatigue. “I expected that I might cough, have a sore throat, or lose my taste.” But he says it feels more like a hangover. “If my friends didn’t have corona, I wouldn’t even have been tested. The complaints are that light.”
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So McMillan really only suffered from headaches. However, headache alone is not an indication that it is omikron, immunologist Ger Rijkers tells EditieNL. Although, according to him, it could well be that a new corona variant is accompanied by new symptoms. “It is not necessary, but it is also not very strange. The virus itself also changes.”
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Inflammatory disease
It is not yet clear whether headaches are really a symptom of omikron. According to Rijkers, more data is needed for this. “But that it could be a symptom is easily explained,” he says. “That’s because corona is an inflammatory disease, and signals of inflammation get to your head.”
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Rijkers explains that you can also get a fever if you have an infection. Your body temperature then rises to be able to work better against the infection. It is a kind of alarm that something is going on in your body. “You should see that headache the same way.”
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According to the immunologist, we should also not forget about the other symptoms. “One variant may have different characteristics,” he says. “But also losing the smell or taste, for example, is still a symptom.”
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Response RIVM
The RIVM also does not yet provide a definitive answer about headaches as a new symptom of corona. It is therefore not yet in the symptom list on the website. A spokesperson says: “The problem is that we don’t know yet whether there are really new or different symptoms, because we don’t have enough data for that. But of course we will look again if headaches are a common complaint. For now nothing points to that for us and the WHO hasn’t said it’s a symptom yet.”
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