Lung damage from coronavirus

March 22, 2020 9:56 AM

Can you get permanent lung damage from coronavirus? I've read some reports that pneumonia from coronavirus is particularly severe because it damages all the lungs (guardian link) and that some patients have trouble breathing (scmp link). Is that something people bounce back from, or materially different from either viral/bacterial pneumonias? Or is it something new that could cause long lasting damage.
posted by earlsofsandwich to Science & Nature (7 answers total)

There have been some small studies suggesting yes, it can cause damage that lasts.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:25 AM on March 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Here’s what coronavirus does to the body (Nat Geo)

During the third phase, lung damage continues to build—which can result in respiratory failure. Even if death doesn’t occur, some patients survive with permanent lung damage. According to the WHO, SARS punched holes in the lungs, giving them “a honeycomb-like appearance”—and these lesions are present in those afflicted by novel coronavirus, too.

posted by katra at 11:03 AM on March 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

As with anything in medicine, it's waaaaaaaay too early to definitively say anything about covid19. It resembles other things that we do know about, so we can make good guesses, but that's about it.
ARDS ,which is the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome that has been described in SARS classic and other afflictions, seems to be a good guideline for what some are reporting, but we're quite a ways from knowing, because we don''t have any long-term survivors do we?

I would still take anything that sounds authoritative with a grain of salt. Good guesses that are couched as guesses are the best you can get.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:04 PM on March 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do. Yes, by itself, or because of it's effects on your immune system, damage to the important bits of your lungs (as if there were un-important bits of your lungs) can occur. Whether one can recover and heal... don't know. It's a virus, it's going to infect cells, those cells are going to die and rupture because they're full from making more virus. A bunch of those cells are going to be cells lining your lungs.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:08 PM on March 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Another potential cause of lung damage from the illness is ventilator-associated lung injury.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 1:50 PM on March 22, 2020

Deutsche Welle—COVID-19: Recovered patients have partially reduced lung function

(That may be covering the same study as the SCMP link in the OP, which my ad blocker is preventing me from reading.)
posted by XMLicious at 2:10 PM on March 23, 2020

Covid-19 can damage lungs of victims beyond recognition, expert says (Guardian, Jun. 15, 2020) ("In findings that [Prof Mauro Giacca of King’s College London] said showed the potential for “real problems” after survival, he told the Lords science and technology committee that he had studied the autopsies of patients who died in Italy after 30 to 40 days in intensive care and discovered large amounts of the virus persisting in lungs as well as highly unusual fused cells.")

More evidence emerges on why covid-19 is so much worse than the flu (WaPo / MSN reprint, May 21, 2020) ("Researchers who examined the lungs of patients killed by covid-19 found evidence that it attacks the lining of blood vessels there, a critical difference from the lungs of people who died of the flu, according to a report published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. [...] The observations in a small number of autopsied lungs buttress reports from physicians treating covid-19 patients. Doctors have described widespread damage to blood vessels and the presence of blood clots that would not be expected in a respiratory disease.")
posted by katra at 7:42 PM on June 15, 2020