SALFORD, ENGLAND (VINnews) — A 108-year-old British woman who survived the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu succumbed to the coronavirus, according to a report by the Guardian newspaper.
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Hilda Churchill died in a Salford nursing home on Saturday, just hours after testing positive for COVID-19 — and just eight days before her 109th birthday. The oldest known coronavirus victim in the UK, Hilda was born in 1911, seven years before the influenza that infected 500 million people worldwide and killed her 12-month-old baby sister.
“It was never something she talked about being frightened of, though,” said her grandson, Anthony Churchill. But “she was scared of this new virus.”
“She survived so much and this was just another thing,” Anthony said. “She was a person who just got on with things — never asked for sympathy or said she was hard done by.”
The last time Anthony visited his grandmother they chatted about the coronavirus.
“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,” he said.
Hilda and most of her family became infected with the Spanish Flu while living in Crewe, England.
“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,” her grandson said.
“She was saying how amazing it is that something you can’t see can be so devastating.”
A seamstress, Hilda moved to Salford during the Great Depression to find work. She had four children, 11 grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren. She had been in good health until a fall and moved into the nursing home 10 months ago.
“She had a fall and her legs just packed up. She never understood how she got so old. I think it was the hard work that kept her going. That and good genes,” Anthony said.
“She had been with me all of my life — she was just the best and we are totally heartbroken.”
Meanwhile, a 102-year-old Italian woman has defeated the odds and survived the coronavirus. Italica Grondona, dubbed “Highlander” or “immortal” by her bemused doctors, successfully recovered from coronavirus in Genoa, Italy, after being hospitalized for 20 days.
According to Dr Vera Sicbaldi, who treated Grondona, she was hospitalized at the beginning of March for “mild heart failure”. He added that she showed mild coronavirus symptoms following which she was tested and her results were positive. Sicbaldi added that “we did very little, she recovered on her own.”
Grondona’s surviving the much-dreaded coronavirus came not only as a glimmer of hope for senior citizens but also impressed the doctors so much that they decided to study her survival deeper.
Sicbaldi said, “We got serological samples, she is the first patient we know that might have gone through the ‘Spanish flu’ since she was born in 1917.”
The news comes as another patient, a 101-year-old man in another northern Italian city, also survived a bout with the coronavirus. Both Grondona and the man were born around the time of the Spanish flu and doctors surmise that they may have developed antibodies then which enabled them to survive the coronavirus 101 years later.