People who recover from Covid-19 might be left with substantially weakened lung function, with some left gasping for air when walking quickly, doctors in Hong Kong said.
The Hong Kong Hospital Authority made the findings after studying the first wave of patients who were discharged from the hospital and had fully recovered from Covid-19.
Out of 12 people in the group, 2 to 3 saw changes in their lung capacity which in more precise they were with a drop of 20-30% in lung function .
“They gasp if they walk a bit more quickly,” Owen Tsang Tak-yin, the medical director of the authority’s Infectious Disease Centre, told a press conference Thursday, according to the South China Morning Post.
Tsang added, however, that patients can do cardiovascular exercises, like swimming, the improve their lung capacity over time.
While it’s too early to establish long-term effects of the disease, scans of 9 patients’ lungs also “found patterns similar to frosted glass in all of them, suggesting there was organ damage,” Tsang said, according to the Post.
Current coronavirus patients’ CT scans show “ground glass,” a phenomenon in which fluid builds up in lungs and presents itself as white patches, as Business Insider’s Aria Bendix has reported. The scans below, taken from one coronavirus patient at different points in time, show that the person’s “ground glass” became more pronounced as their illness progressed.
As of Saturday morning, 70,878 people had recovered from COVID-19 out of 145,299 confirmed cases, according to data from Ministry of Health Malaysia ( MOH) 5,370 people have died of the disease.
The disease appears to affect the elderly or infirm worse than any other demographic, as the outbreak in Italy has shown.
“Among those who are infected, most will recover,” the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Monday.
The most commonly reported symptoms include a fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath, and some 80% patients will experience a mild illness, according to the WHO.
Stay safe peeps!
Source : Business Insider