(WHDH) — A trauma surgeon says X-rays from her COVID-19 patients often come back with scarring and that they “look worse than any type of terrible smoker’s lung.”
Dr. Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, an assistant professor of surgery with Texas Tech University, recently tweeted, “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.”
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 K. Bankhead MD (@BBankheadMD) January 4, 2021
“All the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is, it’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 started to rage across the country.
People with severe symptoms always show a severe chest X-ray, Bankhead-Kendall told the news outlet. People who are asymptotic show severe X-rays about 70 to 80 percent of the time.
“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,” Bankhead-Kendall said.
At this time, Bankhead-Kendall believes it’s too early to know if the lung scarring will heal.
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