The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc around the world as it continues to spread at an alarming rate. Millions of people have already succumbed to the unpleasant disease. There are many others who survived the virus and many others who never knew if they contracted it, as they may have remained asymptomatic. However, the observations made by a trauma surgeon from Texas, United States, which she recently posted on social media, are quite worrying.
Dr. Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, from the Health Science Center at Texas Tech University, found that the lungs of recovered COVID-19 patients appear to be in a much worse condition than that of smokers. The doctor has been treating patients since the beginning of the pandemic and has observed numerous radiographs of patients infected with COVID-19. She said the lungs of the affected patients had intense scarring.
She recently accessed Twitter to say that “post-Covid lungs look worse than any type of terrible smoker’s lung we’ve ever seen.” She said these lungs collapse and clot as the shortness of breath continues.
Check out her post on Twitter:
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but “post-Covid” lungs look worse than ANY type of terrible smoker’s lungs we’ve ever seen.
And they collapse. And they clot off.
And the shortness of breath lingers on… & on… & on.
— Brittany Bankhead-Kendall MD (@BKendallMD) January 4, 2021
Bankhead-Kendall said the x-rays of smokers’ lungs look a little cloudy, but those of patients with COVID-19 are almost completely white, indicating intense scarring and shortness of breath entering the organ.
The doctor said that everyone is concerned about death rates, which is certainly a cause for concern, but the long-term effects of the virus on survivors are also a major threat.
“All survivors who test positive, (for them) will be a problem,” Bankhead-Kendall was quoted by DailyMail.
She said that all the COVID-19 patients she treated had a severe X-ray. Even among asymptomatic patients, 70 to 80 percent of them had severe X-ray results. She said there are people who say they are fine, but when their X-rays are checked, “they absolutely have a bad chest X-ray”.
Bankhead-Kendall compared three radiographs, one from a healthy person, one from a smoker and one from a COVID-19 patient.
The x-ray of the healthy person showed a lot of black space, which indicated that he can inhale a good amount of air. The smoker’s X-ray showed white and cloudy lines that represented inflammation and damage to the walls of the lungs. The worst results were seen in the patient COVID-19, whose lungs were almost completely white, indicating pulmonary opacity, which means that the patient is unable to ingest sufficient oxygen into the lungs.
Bankhead-Kendall warned that even those who are not experiencing any difficulties at the moment, may have problems later.