In order to have a reasonably reliable picture of how often and with what symptoms you yourself have been ill, just as with family members living under the same roof, you would have to have kept exact records throughout your life to be able to say whether this whole thing had any unusual influence.

As soon as there is a lot of publicity about a matter, people pay attention to it, where before they might have paid little attention to colds and their various degrees of severity.

I would distrust my own judgement on that. But at the same time I maintain that if you take into account about four or five years, I would say that I have not become any more or less ill than I was five years before.
Over a period of about twenty years, one can only remember illnesses that were really very serious, perhaps even involving in-patient treatment or weeks of absence from work. Everything that interrupted the regular everyday life in this clear way. So what you don't remember will not have been very serious.

The problem with C. is that everyone gets hung up on every little bit and thinks they have severe symptoms or something particularly different than usual. I wouldn't know about that, because I've never watched my colds/flus with a wary eye, but sweated them out and slept them off. Just as you said in your comment. I don't know if "loss of taste" was already part of the symptoms before C. "existed" or if I only noticed it after the hysteria started.

... And then, probably no illness is all the same as the one one got before. Even under the same name it always changes.

I even let people, unmasked and ungloved, into his room.

Of course, why not! We did the same here. We behaved as we always behaved. When someone was ill, you visit and give some affection, cake, food and leave to let them rest and recover. Except someone was not willing to get visits (though it never happened because of "contagion" but because of "headaches, tiredness, weakness and sleepiness".)