A 101-year-old man in Rimini is back at home with his family on Friday after winning the fight against COVID-19.
It is the latest case of an elderly patient surviving the coronavirus outbreak in Italy.
According to reports, the man who is identified only as “Mr. P” by authorities, was born during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
Gloria Risi, Rimini’s vice mayor told reporters on Thursday that the 101-year-old was released from the hospital in Rimini and returned home safe after fighting off the infection in the hospital.
She said in a statement:
“Last week Mr. P. was hospitalized in Rimini after testing positive for Covid 19.”
“One detail that makes the life of this person truly extraordinary is that Mr. P. was born in 1919, in the midst of another tragic world pandemic.”
The Spanish flu was a uniquely deadly pandemic that took the lives of tens of millions of people around the world between 1918 and 1920. About 600,000 people in Italy are estimated to have been killed during the outbreak.
She added:
“At 101 years, he lived almost entirely through the past century and then had a glimpse of the new millennium. He has seen everything: war, hunger, pain, progress, crisis and resurrections.”
“And then at the age of over 100 years, fate brought him this new challenge, invisible and terrible at the same time.”
Lisi emphasized that, as soon as people from the hospital learned about the man’s condition, the staff felt a “desperate need” to ensure his recovery.
She told the reporters:
“When the tragic news reports tell us daily of a virus that is dangerous above all to the elderly, there is hope for all of us in the story of a person of this age,.”
“And Mr. P. made it. His family brought him home on Wednesday evening. It shows that even at 101 years old, your fate is not written.”
Despite the fatality rate rising sharply for patients in their 70s and over, there have been a number of stories of elderly Italians making a full recovery after being hospitalized with the virus.
In Brescia, in the worst-hit region of Lombardy, the family of an 83-year-old man who recently recovered from the virus says it seems like the man was reborn.
As a retired former nurse, the man was admitted to the same hospital in which he used to work on March 8th with respiratory problems and was soon diagnosed with the virus.
The man’s son, Federico, said in his statement:
“My dad could have been yet another victim, but’s made it,”
“Maybe having always practiced a lot of sport helped him. Before he got sick he was riding for kilometers on his bike,”
“Now he looks like a new person. It’s like he was reborn. Perhaps having won this battle has given him new energy.“
On the other hand, in other areas in Lombardy, in Lodi, which has experienced one of the biggest outbreaks in Italy, an 86-year-old woman named Gianna was also reported to have recovered on Wednesday after spending seven weeks fighting the infection in the hospital.
And to add, another 95-year-old woman recently became the first patient in the province of Modena, Emilia-Romagna, to recover from the coronavirus infection.