TOPLINE
Maria Branyas, a 113-year-old Spanish woman and the country’s oldest person, has also become the country’s oldest survivor of coronavirus, according to Spanish media.
KEY FACTS
Born in 1907 in San Francisco, Branyas spent her early childhood years in the U.S. before moving back home to Spain in 1915—specifically, to the region of Catalonia.
For the past 20 years, she’s been living in a care home in the Catalonian city of Olot, Spanish news agency EFE reports.
There she celebrated her 113th birthday on March 4, 2020—ten days before Spain imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe, which has made it impossible for Branyas to see her family since then.
After Branyas was declared Spain’s oldest living person in December, her daughter began managing a Twitter account in her name.
From the Twitter account, Branyas informed her followers on March 27, 2020, that coronavirus was spreading through the care home. She wrote a message thanking the staff who were putting their lives on the line to take care of residents like her: “Despite the anguish and pressure, they come to take care of us every day. Thanks.”
She tested positive for coronavirus in April and was put in isolation in her room until her latest coronavirus test returned a negative result. In a tweet last week, she mentioned she defeated COVID-19.
“The experience of Maria Branyas is remarkable. Her story offers a powerful reminder that people of all ages can survive coronavirus and continue to lead an active life afterwards. Her survival shows the weakness of approaches that rely on chronological age as a basis for limiting access to care,” Thomas Scharf, professor of social gerontology and president of the British Society of Gerontology, told Forbes. “Universal health care systems that offer care based on individual need rather than ability to pay mean that more people like Maria Branyas can overcome coronavirus and spend valuable time with their loved ones.”
Branyas is among the oldest survivors of coronavirus in the world. In the U.K., The Guardian reported a 106-year-old woman was reported to have recovered from coronavirus in April, and Chinese media reported the recovery of a 103-year-old woman in March.
KEY QUOTE: “In the solitude of my room, fearless and hopeful, I don’t quite understand what’s going on in the world. But I think nothing will be the same again. And don’t think about redoing, recovering, rebuilding. It will have to be done all over again and differently,” she wrote in a series of tweets on April 2, having begun to self-isolate. “I won’t be able to help you. In fact, for my age, I will no longer be there. But, believe me, you need a new order, a change in the hierarchy of values and priorities, a New Human Age . . . Health and strength, you will succeed.”
CRUCIAL BACKGROUND: Spain is one of the worst-hit countries in the world, recording more than 227,000 cases of coronavirus and 26,744 COVID-19-related deaths so far. Elderly people represent a majority of the recorded deaths worldwide. But some health officials warned not to give up hope for the recovery of elderly patients: “I think it’s easy to get a perception that if you are older and you get this virus, then you’re a goner—absolutely not, the great majority of people will recover from this virus, even if they are in their 80s,” Professor Chris Whitty, the U.K.’s chief medical officer, said in March.
There are between 300 to 450 supercentenarians like Branyas in the world—people who live to be 110 years old or more—according to the Gerontology Research Group, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to the study of longevity.
A recent study looking to understand what makes supercentenarians’ immune systems able to fight off diseases for so long, sees a possible answer in the production of T cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a crucial role in the body’s response to diseases.
