We’re going into another cold and flu season during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a trifecta of viral illnesses no one wants to deal with. Not to mention, there’s a lot of confusion over cold versus COVID symptoms. Pre-pandemic, it was easy to brush off symptoms like a runny nose, cough, and congestion as just the common cold. But now, those symptoms can send anyone into a panic spiral of worrying that they have COVID-19. Real talk? “There are no easy ways to tell the difference,” says Lewis Nelson, MD, the chair of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Each illness can have its own range of severity, he points out, leaving a lot of gray area. To read the full story.