Surgeon: Post-COVID lungs ‘look worse’ than lungs of all horrible smokers – Boston News, Weather, Sports

(WHDH) – Trauma surgeon says x-rays from his COVID-19 patients often come back with scarring and “look worse than any kind of terrible smoker’s lung.”

Dr Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Texas Tech University, recently tweeted: “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but ‘post-Covid’ lungs seem worse than ANY type terrible smoker’s lung. I never saw.

“All the survivors and the people who have tested positive is that’s going to be a problem,” Bankhead-Kendall told KTVT-TV.

Bankhead-Kendall has treated thousands of symptomatic and asymptotic COVID-19 patients since March, when the pandemic began to rage across the country.

People with severe symptoms always have a severe chest x-ray, Bankhead-Kendall told the outlet. People with asymptosis have severe X-rays about 70 to 80% of the time.

“There are still people who say, ‘I’m fine, I have no problem’ and you take their chest x-ray and they have absolutely a bad chest x-ray,” Bankhead-Kendall said.

For now, Bankhead-Kendall thinks it’s too early to know if the scarring in the lungs will heal.

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