Flu season 2019: Can you have the flu and a cold at the same time?

Whether or not you can be infected by the cold and flu at the same time is a matter of how your immune system tackles infection. Cold and flu viruses will infect the respiratory tract, from your lungs up to your nose. The immune response is the same for both the cold and the flu, so while you can have two viruses inhabiting your body at once, the same mechanisms are involved to get rid of them. This means you could be infected by two viruses, but the symptoms would be exactly the same and you might never know.