COVID-19 asymptomatic cases may still develop lung damage
Absence of symptoms does not necessarily mean absence of harm CT scan showing ground-glass opacity (GGO ), similar to the kind of lesions in asymptomatic COVID-19 patients revealed by the new study. Credit: Mluisamtz11/Wikimedia Commons , CC BY-SA One of the biggest conundrums surrounding COVID-19 is its astonishing variability of disease prognosis. Take two people of identical demographics and one of them might end up in the ICU while the other might not even have any symptoms to show. This unpredictability is what partly makes this virus extremely challenging to contain. Yet, even though COVID-19 positive cases may be asymptomatic, that doesn’t mean that organs are spared from damage ‘under the hood’. In a new study, Chinese researchers at Wuhan University performed high-resolution CT scans on 58 asymptomatic patients with COVID-19 who showed evidence of pneumonia. They were diagnosed with fluorescence reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (fRT-PCR) assays....
