While Italy has been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, one 101-year-old man has made a miraculous recovery from the virus. Known only as Mr. P, CNN reports the elderly man was admitted to a hospital Rimini, Italy last week after he tested positive for the coronavirus. While older people are more vulnerable to the virus, Mr. P left the hospital fully recovered on Thursday.
Gloria Lisi, the deputy mayor of Rimini, called his recovery "truly extraordinary" and has inspired "hope for the future." She added, "Mr. P made it. The family brought him home yesterday evening. To teach us that even at 101 years the future is not written." Mr. P was also born during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, which ultimately took somewhere between 30 million and 50 million lives worldwide.
"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," Lisi said of Mr. P. "And then at the age of over 100 years, fate brought him this new challenge, invisible and terrible at the same time. ... 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."
The city of Rimini has 1,189 out of the more than 80,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Italy as of Thursday. There has been more deaths in Italy than in any other country, with a reported figure of 8,215 deaths. The closest behind is Spain, with 64,059 confirmed cases and 4,858 deaths.
