Italian woman beats COVID-19 at 108

Fatima Negrini, a 108-year-old woman from northern Italy, has joined the ranks of very few centenarians who have recovered from COVID-19.

“God forgot about me,” Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper, quoted Negrini as saying in its Saturday edition, in which it reported that the woman turned 108 on Wednesday.

NAN reports that the paper published a picture of the wheelchair-bound Negrini in front of a chocolate and cream cake, flanked by a carer with a giant heart-shaped birthday card.

Negrini had been a resident of the Anni Azzurri San Faustino nursing home in Milan for many years, according to a spokesman for the facility, which cares for aged people.

It is also understood that the woman caught the novel coronavirus in April but tested negative in mid-May, although she had always been an asymptomatic COVID-19 patient.

Negrini has three sons aged 89, 88, and 78, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. She further stretches the list of old women who have suffered the disease, yet, recovered.

Maria Branyas, a 113-year-old believed to be the oldest woman in Spain, had recovered from the novel coronavirus after living through both the 1918 flu pandemic and the 1936 Spanish civil war.

Sylvia Goldsholl, another woman in the United States, also survived the disease at 108, having lived through the 1918 flu pandemic despite the disease’s fatality risk for aged people.