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Covid Mix-Ups

Photo: Justin Sullivan
Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)

Anyone who’s woken up with a tickle in their throat or other flu-like symptoms over the past two years has likely worried that they’ve contracted covid-19. And while a lot of those suspicions have proven correct, sometimes the cause of covid-like illness can turn out to be much stranger.

Doctors in July reported that a patient of theirs initially hospitalized for covid-19 was actually suffering from another respiratory illness, one that had made headlines two years earlier: a lung condition caused by tainted vaping devices, officially called “E-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury” or EVALI. The woman’s symptoms of fatigue, shortness of breath, and recurrent fever, along with abdominal pain, vomiting, and headaches, can unfortunately happen during both covid-19 and EVALI, which contributed to the confusion. Nearly all cases of EVALI have been traced to vaping devices used to consume THC that have been laced with oily additives like vitamin E. The woman did report vaping THC, but it’s not completely certain whether tainted THC was the culprit here, the doctors said.

Also this summer, a California woman’s suspected case of covid-19 had its own left-field explanation: a rare infection of flea-borne typhus, one that she had likely caught from handling a dead rat recently.

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