A young woman whose lungs were destroyed beyond repair by the novel coronavirus received a new set of lungs at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital last week, her doctors announced Thursday. It’s reportedly the first time a COVID-19 patient in the U.S. has undergone a double lung transplant. Dr. Ankit Bharat, who performed the surgery, told reporters that the woman — who is in her 20s and had no serious underlying medical conditions prior to contracting COVID-19 — had some of the most damaged lungs he’d ever seen. The virus had left her lungs full of holes and “completely plastered to tissue around them, the heart, the chest wall and diaphragm,” Bharat told The New York Times. Without the transplant, the woman — who spent almost two months on a ventilator and heart-lung machine before the surgery — would have died, he said.

Source: Huffington Post June 12, 2020 00:22 UTC