Good News / 100-yr-old Indore woman recovers from coronavirus 2 weeks after losing son to virus

BHOPAL: A centenarian woman, who lost her son to the coronavirus 17 days ago, has now defeated the deadly infection. The 100-year-old granny hailing from Nehru Nagar in Indore, a COVID-19 hotspot, is possibly the oldest patient in the country to recover from the disease.

She was among the 67 COVID-19 patients, which also included a 4-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl, who was discharged from different hospitals in Indore on Thursday evening, after turning negative for the virus.

Importantly, the mother of three sons, the centenarian lost her second son due to the COVID-19 infection on May 4. Two days later all remaining members of the 16-strong family were screened and sampled by the health department for the virus.

Six of them, including the centenarian who heads the family, her youngest son, grandson, grandson’s wife, and two great-grandchildren tested COVID-19 positive on May 10 and were since then hospitalized at Sri Aurobindo Institute Medical Sciences (SAIMS) Hospital in Indore. Besides the centenarian, four other family members have also been discharged from the hospital.

After battling the deadly virus for 11 days, the 100-year-old woman tested negative for the killer virus and was discharged from the hospital, the Indore district’s chief medical and health officer (CMHO) Dr Praveen Jadia confirmed on Friday.

According to Dr Ravi Dosi, the senior chest physician and pulmonologist at the SAIMS Hospital, “The only symptoms the granny showed after being admitted at the hospital was slight fever. Unlike the other elderly patients who require oxygen support for long, she was on oxygen support just for a few days. It was her strong will to live long with family, which largely saw her successfully battle the killer infection.”

“Even when we doctors became frustrated or downbeat or any of the other patient became depressed, she turned the prime motivator for us and pepped up our spirits. The kind of will and wish to live despite losing her son to the same infection was unparallel,” recounted Dr Dosi.

One of the granny’s grandsons, who was among the other five family members to have been hospitalized on May 10 claimed, “Our granny has hardly fallen seriously ill in the last few decades. She only suffers from the old-age problem of joint pain and nothing else. Now we are waiting for my sister-in-law to recuperate and get discharged from the hospital soon.”   

As per COVID-19 data available online, after recovering from the virus, the 100-year-old Indorean could have made her place among the nine oldest patients in the world (aged between 100 and 104 years) to have recovered from the novel Coronavirus.

Indore is one the prime COVID-19 hotspots of the country and has reported maximum 2850 positive cases so far in Madhya Pradesh. As many as 109 patients have died of the killer virus till Friday.

With 67 more patients being discharged on Thursday, till now 1280 patients have recovered from COVID-19 in Indore, which still has 1461 active patients admitted at different hospitals.