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My children coughed, have runny noses and fevers.
It could be Covid 19, a cold, flu etc. But I am not sure.
Do we say "cold" to refer to any illness that makes you cough, have a runny nose, a fever etc such as a cold, flu, Covid etc?
For example, "you are not over your cold yet" or "you are not over your illness yet".
However, saying "illness" is a bit stilted or not natural.
Yes, most people would describe any illness that gave them a runny nose as 'a cold' in the absence of any more certain diagnosis. Colds are so common (hence the term 'the common cold') that most people would not seek medical advice when experiencing the typical symptoms of a cold. So, when most people say they have a cold, it is not an expert diagnosis - it could be something more serious, but they just don't know.
Covid-19 has of course changed things in most countries - where testing has been actively encouraged and widely available, people have been able to find out if their symptoms mean they have the virus. But if they test negative with symptoms they can treat at home, they are likely to default to a self-diagnosis of 'a cold'.
Similarly, 'flu' is not something that most people would get an expert diagnosis for. Sure, if someone is hospitalised for pneumonia then they are likely to get a blood test and influenza might get confirmed, but in general if someone has symptoms that are a little worse than the common cold, such as a fever, they might self-diagnose as having flu. In my experience as a manager seeing staff self-declaring illness for work purposes I see a lot of illness described as "cold symptoms" or "flu symptoms" which is a way of saying your symptoms matched that illness, but you don't really know for sure.
There are a lot of other general words to describe illness that is not particularly severe. In British English, we don't usually say "I'm sick", as in US English - sickness primarily means vomiting in the UK, although strangely we do still refer to time off from work or school due to illness as "being off sick" or "sick leave". We might say "I'm ill", but there are also numerous other words and expressions for general unwellness such as "unwell", "poorly", or "not well" which could all be used in place of a proper diagnosis.
The problem is that several things are getting conflated here. There's the way certain terms are used medically, and the way they're used colloquially.
Medically speaking, a lot of viruses produce the same symptoms, because your body fights them all off the same way, at least initially. You get congested, may have a cough, may have a fever. We usually refer to those symptoms as "having a cold."
There is a strain of viruses that are known as influenza viruses; depending on the person, the strain of virus, and much else, when you get infected with an influenza virus, you may experience symptoms like you do when you "have a cold", or you may experience worse symptoms. In general, if you progress to things like body aches, vomiting, and so on, you'd probably refer to that as "having the flu."
And now there's COVID-19. For most people, if you get infected with COVID-19, you have no symptoms. Some people will have cold-like symptoms, some people will have flu-like symptoms, and some people will have symptoms that are, for the most part, unique to COVID-19.
Until very, very recently, we usually didn't test for any of the specific viruses that caused cold or the flu, because it didn't matter. We had no way of treating viral illnesses; the focus was on addressing the symptoms and making the patient feel better (we'll ignore over-prescription of antibiotics here). Doctors might test for strep throat, because that could be treated with antibiotics, but in general, if you came to a doctor and had cold-like symptoms or flu-like symptoms, you'd be given a fairly generic set of recommendations. We didn't really have a good way to test for viral illnesses anyway; things like PCR testing was incredibly expensive, and again, it didn't matter because knowing what virus was causing your illness wouldn't change how you were being treated.
Even if you were hospitalized, it didn't matter what you had. That's changed, recently, as we have some medications where it really matters if you have a cold virus, or an influenza virus, or COVID-19. And PCR testing is much, much less expensive than it used to be.
At least where I am, if you were sick enough that you'd stay home from work (and this was a problem, but no matter), you'd say you had/have the flu. You would go work with a cold. What you'd call your illness was really a question of symptoms, not of what was actually causing the symptoms.
To answer the question, unless someone had specifically told you "I have a cold," or "I had the flu," or whatever, I'd just ask them "Are you feeling better?"
In the U.S., we usually distinguish among those illnesses. You could simply say that your children are sick or, as KB said in a comment, that they have "cold-like symptoms". It's OK to ask, "Have you gotten over your illness yet?" but if you feel that that is stilted or not natural, then you could ask, "Are you feeling better yet?"
If you knew that you had influenza but told someone that you had a cold, and the person later learned that you'd known that you'd had the flu, then that person might think that you'd been a bit dishonest. The same is certainly true for COVID.
My observation, prior to Covid-19, is that common speech has done what medicine could not. It has cured the common cold. For at least ten years now nobody I know has gotten a cold. Medically they may have contracted the sort of rhinovirus that we used to call a cold, but in speech they have gotten the flu. I agree with you that illness is stilted. We would just ask "Did you get well?" "Getting the flu" seems to be the default for any (not carefully diagnosed) illness including food poisoning. As I understand it influenza does not make you throw up, but in common speech the flu does sometimes. If location matters, I live near San Francisco, CA, USA.
