COVID-19 survivors show severe lungs in X-rays, 'far worse than any type of smokers'

A trauma surgeon has said that the lungs recovered from COVID-19 look ‘far worse’ than that of smokers. While according to Johns Hopkins University tally, at least two million people across the globe have died of the disease, Dr. Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, an assistant professor at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center has said that ‘post-COVID-19’ lungs are more severely damaged than any lungs the medical professionals have ever seen.

After treating nearly a thousand people of COVID-19 since the pandemic began in March, she said that the X-rays of the smokers’ lungs are hazy. However, those who have suffered novel coronavirus infections are almost completely white along with intense scarring and lack of air entering the organs.

While talking to CBS DFW, Bankhead-Kendall said that health experts have been focussing on the mortality of the disease but not the long-term effects of the survivors. However, she further said that all the people who have tested positive for COVID-19 and survived the infection, are going to face problems with damaged lungs. The highly-infectious disease, first discovered in China in December 2019, is seen often leading to complications such as pneumonia that fills the lungs with fluid and become inflamed. 

Bankhead-Kendall said, “Everyone's just so worried about the mortality thing and that's terrible and it's awful...But man, and all the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is - it's going to be a problem.”

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Even asymptomatic patients have severe X-rays

Apart from leading to pneumonia, studies on COVID-19 have even revealed that the epithelial cells are damaged that line the respiratory passages starting from nose to the lungs of the coronavirus patients. The medical professional has also told the media outlet that all patients of COVID-19 of hers have had severe X-ray. Even among the 70 to 80 per cent of asymptomatic individuals have also had severe results.

“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.

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