A group of Italian intensive care doctors from the Medical University of Göttingen, Turin Hospital, and the Health Centre for Human and Applied Physiological Sciences in London says that the COVID-19 virus can induce multiple types of illness from asymptomatic, Type-L, and Type-H. The study on the new coronavirus was published in the journal Intensive Care Medicine.
When illness manifests into more than one direction of concurring medical signs and symptoms it becomes a syndrome. The symptomatic types of COVID-19 “is almost never seen in severe ARDS. Therefore, the same disease actually presents itself with impressive non-uniformity,” the study says.
A summary of the two types of pneumonia due to the new coronavirus
The two different courses of manifestation can be identified by CT scans and they require a different course of treatment too. Type-L comes from “low” symptoms. Low elastance, low ventilation to perfusion ratio, low lung weight, and low-lung recruitability. Patients with this phenotype showed a good response to the increase in the initial fraction of inspired oxygen.
Type-H comes from “high” elastance, high right-to-left-shunt, high lung weight, and high lung recruitability. Patients with this phenotype have a higher risk of lung injury and they are to be considered Acute respiratory distress syndrome patients. It means that they are predisposed to a rapid onset of widespread inflammation in the lungs that can end up in respiratory failure. Intubation is recommended in the earlier stages of the evolution of the disease.
Lung elastance is the capacity of lungs muscle to expand the lungs while inspiring. The ventilation of the perfusion ratio is the one that determines the blood oxygen and carbon dioxide concentration. Lung weight refers to the ratio of lung weight to body weight. The lung recruitability refers to the collapsed areas of the lungs and the efforts to open keep them open. The right-to-left-shunt is the abnormal state of blood flow in the heart that deflects from the normal circuit. The coronavirus causes two types of pneumonia, as per the new research.
