SHOCKING medical scans have revealed how important it is to get your coronavirus vaccines.
Across the UK millions of Brits have now had two doses and a booster vaccine, with the most vulnerable now being eligible for a fourth dose.
Experts have repeatedly said that vaccines and getting your booster doses are key when it comes to getting out of the pandemic.
While most people who are currently catching Omicron experience cold-like symptoms, it might not be a mild virus for people who are vulnerable or those who are unvaccinated or have just had one dose.
The images, published in the journal Radiology show what two different patient’s lungs looked like when they had been infected with Covid.
The first set of scans, A & B, are from a 65-year-old woman who became infected after having two doses of the Pfizer/BionTech jab.
She had a breakthrough infection two months after receiving the second dose of the jab.
The patient had a history of hypertension and the scans showed no clouds in the lungs (opacification).
When experts analysed the lungs they also found no traces of pneumonia – showing that vaccines had prevented the woman from becoming severely unwell with the virus.
The second set of scans show the lungs of a 48-year-old man, one month after his first dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, so he was only partially vaccinated.
The man had no history of history of comorbidity but his CT extent of pneumonia was scored as 1 (1-25 per cent involvement).
The third set of scans came from a 36-year-old man with no underlying health conditions.
His CT extent of pneumonia was scored as 1 (1-25 per cent involvement).
Scans G&H are the most shocking and are from a 58-year-old man who had no vaccines and had a history of hypertension and diabetes.
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The experts said: “He required supplemental oxygen on admission and was admitted to intensive care unit one day later”.
His pneumonia score was cored as 2 (>25 per cent involvement), showing how important it is that people with underlying health issues get vaccinated.
The experts said that breakthrough cases of Covid are on the rise with the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
“Therefore, it is important to know how vaccination impacts not only Covid-19 disease severity but also clinical data and medical imaging results”, they said.
The purpose of the study had been to look at breakthrough infections (people who have been vaccinated and then are infected 14 days or more after receiving their jabs), in those who were fully vaccinated and partly vaccinated.
As part of the study the experts looked at 761 hospitalised patients with Covid-19, the mean age was 47 years, with 51 per cent being female.
They found that just 6.2 per cent of those in hospital with a breakthrough infection were fully vaccinated.
Just 17 per cent were partially vaccinated (one dose) and a 77 per cent were unvaccinated.
The experts found that fully vaccinated status was associated with a lower risk of requiring supplemental oxygen than unvaccinated status, as well as lower risk of intensive care unit (ICU) admission.
The study’s senior author, Yeon Joo Jeong, from the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Institute at Pusan National University Hospital in Busan, South Korea said: “Although the risk of infection is much lower among vaccinated individuals, and vaccination reduces the severity of illness, clinical and imaging data of Covid-19 breakthrough infections have not been reported in detail.
The team also found associations between the risk of severe disease and clinical characteristics such as higher age and a history of diabetes.
Age was also an important determiner of how severe an infection was in patients, even in breakthrough infections, the experts said.
Elderly patients and patients with at least one comorbidity were more common in the vaccinated group than in unvaccinated group in the study – this is because it was this, more vulnerable group, that vaccines were rolled out to first.
Dr Jeong added: “Despite these differences, mechanical ventilation and in-hospital death occurred only in the unvaccinated group.
“Furthermore, after adjusting for baseline clinical characteristics, analysis showed that fully vaccinated patients were at significantly lower risk of requiring supplemental oxygen and of ICU admission than unvaccinated patients.”
