‘My lungs are as bad as my dad’s… who’s 72 and smoked all his life’: The chilling proof that even fit and young Covid victims can suffer lifelong damage from scarring inside the lungs

When it comes to Covid, our lungs are ‘ground zero’. They are one of the primary routes the virus uses to get into the body. But early on in the pandemic, chest X-ray scans revealed something else: where the images should be black, indicating healthy air-filled tissue, in many cases there was a white mist described as resembling ‘ground glass’. It’s the telltale sign of pneumonitis – inflamed lungs as a result of the body’s immune response to the virus. But in the case of Covid, the damage often seems to be far worse and more extensive than with similar illnesses such as flu. This distinctive pattern became known as ‘Covid lung’, and many doctors now say they’re almost able to diagnose the disease just by looking at one of these images. The worst affected end up on ventilators in intensive care, fighting for breath. About a third don’t make it out alive. And while the majority make a full recovery from Covid, there are signs of lingering damage in the lungs where the virus first took hold. Early on in the pandemic, chest X-ray scans revealed that where the images should be black, in many cases there was a… Read full this story

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