More than three years after the start of the pandemic, many Covid survivors continue to struggle. Some, especially those who became so severely ill that they were hospitalized and unable to breathe on their own, face lasting lung damage.
To better understand the long-term impact of Covid’s assault on the lungs, The New York Times spoke with three patients who were hospitalized during the pandemic’s early waves, interviewed doctors who treated them and reviewed C.T. scans of their lungs over time.
One patient spent time connected to a ventilator; the other two were so debilitated they required months on a heart-lung bypass machine called ECMO. These patients were not yet vaccinated — for two, vaccines weren’t available, and the third had planned to get vaccinated but was infected before he could.
The Times analyzed hundreds of millions of data points from the patients’ scans to reconstruct their lungs in 3-D. The resulting visualization offers a vivid, visceral picture of damage that can linger years after infection and irrevocably alter everyday life.
Many patients who experienced such severe lung damage early in the pandemic did not recover. Many died from a combination of direct injury by the virus and storms of inflammation incited by the immune system’s attempts to battle the infection. These three patients have been able to regain lung function to varying degrees, but the differences in their experiences reflect how unpredictable Covid’s impact can be.
Effects vary by how healthy people were before infection and how their immune systems responded to the virus. Ms. Rodríguez has come closer to recovering, most likely helped by her youth and previous good health.