A 27-year-old nurse in the US  has shared her before and after photos on social media platforms to show the horrifying reality of spending eight months in a Covid ward.

According to report from the metro.co.uk, a nurse named Kathryn from Tennessee shared a fresh-faced photo taken just before she graduated in April, next to a recent image of her PPE-scarred face during a weekend shift. It has since been shared close to 52,000 times on Twitter, with many saying Kathryn's photo serves to highlight the strains doctors and nurses treating coronavirus are facing.

Kathryn, who works at a hospital in Tennessee, said the worst scar - the red raw wound on her nose - generally disappears just in time for her to begin her next 12-and-a-half hour shift.

"On Saturday night I was in the middle of a shift, had just come out of a patient's room, and had just taken all my PPE off," the nurse was quoted as saying to metro.co.uk "I had the image in my head of the graduation, and I wanted to show the difference a couple of months can make, and the reality of being a nurse in the pandemic," she added.

According to the report, Kathryn works three 12-and-a-half hour shifts over three nights, then has the following three off.