Will some COVID-19 survivors require a lung transplant to fully recover?

(WBFF) -- Will some COVID-19 survivors require a lung transplant to fully recover?

Patients here in the United States already have.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins are intensely studying the long-term effects on those who become the sickest from the virus.

Hopkins has treated more than 3,000 COVID patients over the last five months.

"I think it will be months to years before we really understand what the long-term impact is going to be on those patients who are really sick,"Dr. Brian Garibaldi, director of Johns Hopkins Biocontainment Unit and associate professor of medicine. He says Hopkins is studying how those who get the sickest, requiring ventilators to breathe, will be affected in the months and years to come.

"Everyone who’s been in the intensive care unit on a breathing machine, we’ve tried to bring them back into a follow up clinic with lung specialists," he says.

He knows of at least two people who’ve recovered from the virus in the United States who have gotten lung transplants because they would not have been able to ever breathe on their own again.

"But what we don’t know yet is what long-term problems are going to be with patients who have been really really sick with COVID. Are some of them going to have permanent lung dysfunction months or years out? Are they going to have progressive lung disease where over time their lung function that’s already been damaged by the virus will get worse?"

Dr. Garibaldi suspects many patients will have long term disabilities. "But it’s a bit early to know yet what that’s going to look like," he says.

To be a candidate for a lung transplant, patients must generally be under the age of 65 and otherwise healthy.

Those with COVID often have other complications.

A transplant is also not a permanent fix.

"The long-term survival from a transplant we’re really talking on the order of six or seven years," he says.

Seeing how severely sick those with the virus can get, doctors urge everyone to remain vigilant in the fight against the spread.

"This is just another reminder of how severe this illness can be," Dr. Garibaldi says.