TEXAS: Sharing a shocking image of a coronavirus patient’s lung on social media, Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, a trauma surgeon said that post-Covid lungs look worse than any type of terrible smoker’s lungs she had ever seen.
Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, an assistant professor of surgery with Texas Tech University, in Lubbock shared a scan of three sets of lungs side-by-side on the social networking website, Twitter.
Compared to a healthy lung – which shows little damage in the scan – a smoker’s lung appears to have a light cloudy film. The x-ray of the Covid lung is much darker white, indicating heavy scarring.
In a series of tweets, the doctor said, “Both post-critical illness as well as recovered at home! No one is spared. They all think they’re “survivors” and have “recovered.” But it’s not an illness that’s cured… it’s an illness that’s mitigated for a while if we’re lucky.”
“Everyone’s just so worried about the mortality thing and that’s terrible and it’s awful,” she told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth.
“But man, for all the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is — it’s going to be a problem.”
Dr Bankhead-Kendall reported that every patient who she had treated for Covid-19 had shown severe lung damage when X-rayed.
“There are still people who say ‘I’m fine. I don’t have any issues,’ and you pull up their chest X-ray and they absolutely have a bad chest X-ray,” she said.
When it comes to those who spend days or even weeks struggling to breath on ventilators, it is not hard to imagine that their lungs would be heavily damaged as a result.
However, research into the impact seemingly mild cases of Covid-19 can have on lungs is only just beginning.
A lot of people who were asymptomatic to begin with have found themselves struggling to breath in the months after they were infected.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, has warned that patients may feel the impact of Covid-19 on their lungs for years.
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