A doctor has shared photos of a coronavirus patient’s lungs, revealing the damage the virus can cause in a matter of days.
Dr Cedric ‘Jamie’ Rutland, a pulmonary and critical care doctor based in California, used CAT scans to image the lungs of a severely ill patient.
Speaking to Fox Nation, he explained: “The virus will enter through your trachea into your lung and it binds to a certain receptor.
"Once it binds to that receptor, your immune system gets alarmed... so now you get all these cells that are going to rush to your lung. And when these cells rush to your lung, they start to fill your lung up with cells and fluid."
Dr Rutland explained that coronavirus can cause the immune system to overreact, resulting in lungs that are too full of fluid to supply the body with oxygen.
He said: “You don't get oxygen in your bloodstream and you become extremely short of breath. That’s what's so dangerous about this disease.”
While lungs usually appear as black in CAT scans, the images of the coronavirus patient's lungs show them as white.
Dr Rutland explained: “The first thing you're going to see is this increased whiteness - this light grey material - that we call ground-glass opacity (GGO).
"The lungs are supposed to be black.
"We know that the infiltration of cells into the [lungs] causes a reduction of your gas exchange, so you get really short of breath. You can't absorb that oxygen.
"But in this case," he went on, "you can see these white areas of the lung, first starting out with ground-glass opacity - very light gray area - and then as the density becomes more thick and as the cell infiltration becomes increased, you get more whiteness."
