When the father of Fan Deng, a prominent former anchor of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, started dozing off more frequently during the day, the family didn’t worry.
This wasn’t uncommon, after all, for someone in their 80s. The man’s mind was clear and his appetite was as good as ever. But when the family used a pulse oximeter out of caution, they found his blood oxygen level dangerously low at 88 percent, 4 percent below the threshold requiring medical attention. By the time the family got him to the hospital, his blood oxygen levels had plunged to the 60s.
Only after a series of X-ray scans at the hospital did the family realize the gravity of the situation: His lungs were mostly white in a CT scan. Healthy lungs would normally appear as dark regions in an X-ray or CT scan….