The first reports of severe acute respiratory symptoms from a novel coronavirus called coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) occurred in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December 2019.
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The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic by March 2020.
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The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in a current global health emergency. Clinical information about the findings of COVID-19 and its associated complications are constantly evolving and becoming more widely available. Providers should be familiar with both typical symptoms and image study results for COVID-19 as well as less commonly reported complications of progressive COVID-19, such as spontaneous pneumomediastinum and spontaneous pneumothorax as highlighted in this case.
Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2.1 COVID-19 first occurred in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and by March 2020 COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.1
Case Presentation: We describe a case of a 52-year-old female with past medical history of asthma, type 2 diabetes, and previous tobacco use who presented to the emergency department with dyspnea and was found to be positive for COVID-19. We discuss the computed tomographic finding of “crazy-paving” pattern in the patient’s lungs and the significance of this finding in COVID-19 patients.
Discussion: Emergency providers need to be aware of the different imaging characteristics of various stages of COVID-19 to appropriately treat, isolate, and determine disposition of COVID-19 infected patients. Ground-glass opacities are the earliest and most common imaging finding for COVID-19.2-4 Crazy-paving pattern is defined as thickened interlobular septa and intralobular lines superimposed on diffuse ground-glass opacities and should be recognized by emergency providers as a radiographic finding of progressive COVID-19.2-4
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