Is a sore throat without cold symptoms contagious? This depends on the cause of the sore throat, if it is due to the early stages of a cold with a sore throat without the typical viral cold symptoms such as nasal congestion and runny nose. In this case, you should first determine whether the sore throat is caused by a cold, which may be contagious. If the sore throat is only caused by inflammation such as tonsillitis or pharyngitis, it is not a cold and there are no symptoms of a cold. In this case, it is generally not contagious, so we can determine whether the patient is simply infected, or whether the sore throat is caused by an infection due to a cold through blood tests, so as to determine whether it is contagious or not.