COVID-19 symptoms in 2025 look a lot like a bad cold or flu. The most common complaints are cough, congestion or runny nose, fever or chills, sore throat, headache, and fatigue. While the virus still causes shortness of breath and loss of taste or smell in some people, these hallmark symptoms from earlier in the pandemic are far less frequent with current variants. Symptoms typically appear 2 to 14 days after exposure, with most people noticing them around day 3 or 4.
The Most Common Symptoms Right Now
Current COVID strains, descendants of the Omicron lineage, tend to settle in the upper airways more than earlier variants did. That shift shows up in the symptom profile. The CDC lists the following as current COVID symptoms: cough, congestion or runny nose, fever or chills, sore throat, fatigue, headache, muscle or body aches, shortness of breath, diarrhea, nausea or vomiting, and loss of taste or smell. For most people, the illness feels like a head cold with a fever, sometimes with a scratchy or hoarse voice layered in.
What’s changed over time is the relative frequency. Respiratory symptoms like cough and congestion now dominate, while the more distinctive early-pandemic symptoms have faded into the background. The experience for a vaccinated person or someone with prior infection is often milder and shorter than what the same virus caused in 2020.
Loss of Taste and Smell Is Less Common
Early in the pandemic, roughly 80% of infected people reported losing their sense of smell. With Omicron-era variants, that number dropped to about one-third. It still happens, but it’s no longer the red flag it once was. Among people who do lose their sense of smell, research from the RECOVER cohort found that about 80% had measurably impaired smell on standardized testing, confirming these aren’t just subjective complaints. Some people recover quickly, while others deal with distorted or reduced smell for months.
Gut Symptoms Are Real but Declining
COVID has always been able to affect the digestive system, and it still does. Up to 50% of patients in some studies report diarrhea, while nausea and vomiting show up in roughly a third of cases. Abdominal pain and loss of appetite are also reported. However, the overall rate of gastrointestinal symptoms has been trending downward with each new variant wave. During the original strain, about 28% of patients reported diarrhea. By the Omicron phase, that dropped to around 14%.
If your main symptoms are nausea and loose stools without much cough or congestion, COVID is still worth considering, especially during a surge. A test is the only reliable way to tell.
How It Differs From Flu and RSV
It mostly doesn’t, at least not by symptoms alone. COVID, flu, and RSV all cause fever, cough, congestion, fatigue, and body aches. The overlap is significant enough that the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and the CDC both say testing is the only dependable way to distinguish between them. That said, a few patterns can offer clues. Flu tends to hit suddenly with high fever and severe body aches. RSV often produces heavy wheezing and is especially rough on infants and older adults. COVID is more likely to cause a loss of taste or smell, though that’s become less reliable as a differentiator.
If you’re trying to figure out which virus you have, a combination test that checks for COVID, flu, and RSV is available at most pharmacies and clinics.
Symptoms in Children
Kids with COVID most commonly develop fever and cough, similar to adults. Sore throat, runny nose, headache, fatigue, and stomach symptoms like nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea are also frequently reported. One notable finding from the Omicron era: pediatric cases of croup increased substantially, even as other respiratory viruses known to cause croup were declining. Croup causes a distinctive barking cough and is most common in toddlers and preschool-age children.
The incubation period in children during Omicron-dominant waves has been around 3 to 4 days, slightly shorter than the broader 2 to 14 day range the CDC cites for all age groups.
Many Infections Cause No Symptoms at All
A large meta-analysis covering more than 350 studies estimated that about 35% of COVID infections are truly asymptomatic, meaning the person never develops any noticeable symptoms at all. These aren’t presymptomatic cases where symptoms show up later. These are infections that come and go without the person ever feeling sick. This matters because asymptomatic carriers can still spread the virus, and it means negative assumptions based on “feeling fine” aren’t always reliable after a known exposure.
Symptoms That May Signal Longer Illness
Most people recover from COVID within one to two weeks. But certain symptoms during the acute phase are associated with a higher risk of developing long COVID, where symptoms persist for weeks or months. Research using machine learning models found that fatigue, headache, shortness of breath, hoarse voice, and muscle pain during the initial infection carried the most weight in predicting who would go on to have prolonged symptoms. This doesn’t mean everyone with these symptoms will develop long COVID, but they’re worth paying attention to, particularly if they aren’t improving after two or three weeks.
Symptom Rebound After Treatment
Some people experience a rebound of symptoms after finishing antiviral treatment, where they start feeling better and then symptoms return a few days later. This got a lot of attention when antiviral pills first became available, but the data has been more reassuring than the headlines suggested. A large retrospective study found rebound rates of about 5 to 7% regardless of whether patients took antivirals or no treatment at all, suggesting rebound is a feature of the infection itself rather than a side effect of medication.
Some smaller studies found higher rebound rates of 10 to 14% in treated patients, but the rebounds were consistently mild. No hospitalizations or deaths were linked to symptom rebound in the studies reviewed by the CDC. If your symptoms return after a few days of improvement, it’s generally a brief flare rather than a sign of worsening illness.