While there is a lot of doom and gloom over the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world, one can also learn from the resilience of some senior citizen.
A recent article in an Indian newspaper featured “Karnataka’s oldest Covid-19 patient, aged 105, in ICU; stable” Staff at the hospital where the state’s oldest patient was admitted said the 105-year-old man is in ICU and they are trying to procure Remdesivir to treat him. The centenarian, one of the oldest living persons in Karnataka and who was alive at the time of the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, was described by doctors as being lucid
A few weeks ago, the Guardian ran a story of “113-year-old coronavirus survivor: ‘The elderly are the forgotten ones of society’”
Maria Branyas
Weeks after ringing in her 113th birthday, she found herself confined to a room in her care home in north-eastern Spain, suffering from the effects of the coronavirus. Now Maria Branyas – fully recovered and believed to be the world’s oldest Covid-19 survivor – is calling for nothing less than a new world order.
Jerusalem Post Health & Science ran an article about “114-year-old Ethiopian monk could be oldest coronavirus survivor” “An Ethiopian monk may be the oldest person to have survived coronavirus, beating the disease after being hospitalized for three weeks. Tilahun Woldemichael’s exact age is unverifiable as he has no birth certificate, but his family believes him to be 114 years old. If so, he could well be the oldest person so far to have survived COVID-19, edging ahead of Spain’s Maria Branyas, 113, who survived the virus in May with only mild symptoms.His age puts him in a small group of people to have survived both COVID-19 and the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.”
New York Post ran a story in May, “Meet some of the world’s oldest coronavirus survivors” that highlights “A surprising number of centenarians have defied the odds and licked coronavirus, even as it keeps knocking out much younger patients.” One 104-year-old Brooklyn woman had already survived the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, cancer and two broken hips before she beat the coronavirus last month.
Rudolph “Rudi” Heider, 107
Interesting Engineering also ran a feature “17+ of the Oldest People in the World to Have Beaten COVID-19”
Also check out WHO’s COVID-19 Myth Buster ” Catching the new Coronavirus does not mean you will have it for life. Learn more about the Coronavirus on the World Health Organization website. Official info on COVID-19.”