A 101-year-old man that was sick with COVID-19 has now won a victory over the disease and emerged from the hospital healthy. He identifies himself as Mr. P and was born during the time of the Spanish flu pandemic. As a citizen of Italy, he has been fighting the COVID-19 virus, which has already been responsible for changing lives across the planet.

The Latin post reports that the deputy mayor of Rimini, an Italian city, said that Mr. P was admitted last week to a hospital in Rimini. Gloria Lisi said that he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, but on Thursday, he was discharged from the hospital.

The deputy mayor called it “truly extraordinary” and that his recovery will give “hope for the future” to many others. Lisi also says that the case gives hope that “at 101 years, the future is not written.” it is interesting that Mr. P was born during the time of the Spanish flu, which was a different strain of the H1N1 virus. During the years of 1918-1919, it killed some 30-50 million people worldwide. That is almost 1 out of every three people living on earth at the time.

Mr. P became “the story everyone talked about” at the hospital. The deputy mayor said “Mr. P made it. The family brought him home yesterday evening. It teaches us that even at 101 years the future is not written.” According to News 18, “Everyone saw hope for the future of all of us in the recovery of a person more than 100 years old. Every day we see the sad stories from these weeks that mechanically tell about a virus that rages and is especially aggressive on the elderly. But he survived. Mr. P. survived.”

The Italian news agency, ANSA reports that Lisi also said that Mr. P lived through World War II. “He saw everything, Mr. P. War, hunger, pain, progress, crisis, and resurrections.” Mr. P is now joining the ranks of other centenarians who have survived being over 100 years old now that he has recovered from COVID-19. Last week, a 97-year-old woman from South Korea and a 103-year-old from China were also released from the hospital after recovering from COVID-19.

According to The Guardian, Hilda Churchill is the oldest UK resident that became a victim of the coronavirus. She was 108 years old when she died in a nursing care home on Saturday. She was just eight days shy of her 109th birthday when she died. Her grandson, Anthony Churchill, revealed that she was discussing the Spanish flu while the coronavirus pandemic was ongoing. He said, “When I visited her last, we talked about coronavirus and mentioned we might not see her for a while.”

He continued, “She said it was very similar to the Spanish flu but in her day there were no planes and somehow it still managed to spread everywhere.” Even though Churchill and most of her family were infected from the flu and recovered from it, her 12-month-old sister Beryl May died of the virus. Anthony added, “She remembered standing at her bedroom window and seeing this little coffin carrying her baby sister being put into a carriage and being taken away.” 

He added, “She remembers everyone getting it and her mother trying to look after them and her father collapsing in a street and having to be carried home. She was saying how amazing it is that something you can’t see can be so devastating. It was never something she talked about being frightened of, though, and she wasn’t scared of this new virus. She survived so much and this was just another thing. She was a person who just got on with things – never asked for sympathy or said she was hard done by.” 

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