Chest X-rays showed doctors what they were up against.
Healthy lungs full of air look black on the image. In Jason Barbosa's lungs, inflamed and filled with fluid, it looked like a whiteout.
Barbosa was 24, a dad, a husband and a gym buff who liked to lift weights. He was strong, but he wasn't invincible against COVID-19 and a litany of complications.
Doctors had tried everything possible to keep him alive. His ventilator had been turned to the highest setting. It still wasn't enough.
Three times, Barbosa's condition seemed so dire that doctors told his family to say goodbye.
"It takes a lot for me to call a family and say, 'I think this is the end,'" said Dr. Jonathan Tomasko, a cardiac surgeon at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield.