Case report: Spontaneous pneumothorax in resolved, uncomplicated COVID-19 Pneumonia-A literature review

Abstract

As the global COVID-19 pandemic has progressed, awareness of uncommon presentations and complications has increased. The actual incidence of spontaneous pneumothorax was found to be 0.66%, or six patients out of 902 who tested positive in recently published literature of 3368 patients (Zantah M, Dominguez Castillo E, Townsend R, Dikengil F, Criner GJ. Pneumothorax in COVID-19 disease-incidence and clinical characteristics. Respir Res. 2020 Sep 16; 21 (1):236.). Of those six patients, only two (0.22%) were not associated with mechanical ventilation barotrauma or comorbid lung disease such as COPD. Here, we present a spontaneous pneumothorax and pneumomediastinum in a patient four days after he had been discharged from hospitalization due to uncomplicated COVID-19 pneumonia.

Keywords: COVID-19; CT; Case report; Complication; Coronavirus; Pneumomediastinum; SARS-Cov-2; Spontaneous pneumothorax.

Fig. 1

CXR (A) from first admission demonstrating mild scattered patchy opacity bilaterally and CT (B) with patchy ground-glass opacities bilaterally; no evidence of pneumothorax or pneumomediastinum. CT images (C,D,E) from the second admission date demonstrating anterior-lateral pneumothorax (yellow arrowheads) and small pneumomediastinum (yellow arrows). Portable CXR (F) prior to chest tube placement demonstrating the pneumothorax enlarged to approximately 30% (yellow arrowheads). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)