system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is my current cold "a cold in the nose", whilst others are "in the head/chest/throat"? Is the infection localised there, or is it that different cold viruses exhibit different symptoms?
gpt
There are certainly countless different viral strains, whose infectivity may range from asymptomatic to severe. Especially with the common cold. It also mutates all the time so new "mixes" of different phenotypes are always transpiring around you.

The infection might very well be more localized, but most likely due to differences in the virus' own capacity to infect different tissues/wreak havoc, and not due to some sort of bad luck that "got it stuck to only infecting a certain location". AFAIK, rhinoviruses (common cold) have the respiratory tract as their pathogenic route of entry. This may be due to the specific molecular mechanism of pathogenesis in those tissues (tissue specificity), or due to much simpler things like how the virus "likes" colder temperatures than the human body so it is able to be successful only in the airways that are constantly being cooled by breathing.

Viruses are so tiny that, as a general rule, their infectivity and area of infection are much more tied to the actual capabilities of the virus and natural selection allowing it to proliferate and infect whereas another cannot. A localized infection is certainly a thing, but it's not usually because a virus failed to infect those parts, but that it just can't.