101-Year-Old Man Shocks & Inspires Doctors By Surviving Spanish Flu AND Coronavirus

Wow, what an inspiration!

A 101-year-old man has exemplified the tenacity of the human spirit by becoming the oldest known patient in Italy to recover from the coronavirus.

The centenarian, who is being identified only by the name Mr. P, was admitted to a hospital in the Italian town of Rimini last week after testing positive for COVID-19.

At 101 years, Mr. P was well beyond the point where the virus is most fatal; the most recent statistics say roughly 10.4% of patients over the age of 85 don’t survive. According to Italy’s National Institute of Health, nearly 86% of all of their casualties are patients over the age of 70. But just days after his admission, Mr. P was released from confinement after completely recovering from the disease!

Amazingly, this isn’t the first worldwide catastrophe Mr. P has survived.

Rimini’s deputy mayor, Gloria Lisi, told local newspaper Remini Today about the “truly extraordinary” case, declaring:

“Given the progress of the virus, it could not even be called ‘a story like many’ if it were not for a detail that makes the life of the person returned to their loved ones truly extraordinary. Mr. P, from Rimini, was born in 1919, in the midst of another tragic world pandemic.

Mr. P was born in 1919, just a year into the last pandemic which ravaged the world, the Spanish Flu. Unfortunately for the little bambino (who was just a lowercase “p” at the time), that was exactly the same time the virus was hitting his little town in Italy. However, while that pandemic infected a third of the planet and took the lives of somewhere between 30 and 50 million people worldwide and 600,000 in Italy alone, he survived.

Just over 20 years later, Mr. P saw his second disaster — World War II. The war saw a death toll of around half a million Italians, but this man survived. As Deputy Mayor Lisi said:

“He saw everything, Mr. P. War, hunger, pain, progress, crisis and resurrections. Once over the 100-year-old barrier, destiny has put before him this new challenge, invisible and terrible at the same time. And he did it. Mr. P made it… It shows that even at 101 years old, the future has yet to be written.”

Lisi said his quick recovery encouraged everyone at the hospital, renewing all who heard his story with “hope for the future.”

Shockingly, Mr. P is NOT the oldest known survivor of the coronavirus so far. A Chinese grandmother named Zhang Guangfen was discharged from a Wuhan region hospital three weeks ago after recovering from COVID-19. Her age? 103!

[Image via WENN/Instar.]