When William “Bill” Lapschies celebrated his 104th birthday with his family over chocolate cake and his favorite pizza on Wednesday, he wasn’t just marking another annual milestone in his long, full life. He was also celebrating a full recovery from the novel coronavirus as one of the oldest-known survivors of covid-19 in the United States.
In early March, Lapschies and a small group of elderly tenants living together in a state-run veterans’ facility in Lebanon, Ore., started feeling ill. They were among the first Oregon residents to test positive for the coronavirus, and Lapschies’s family worried the illness would prove deadly.
“We all thought, ‘He’s 103, what are the odds he’s going to come out of this?’ ” granddaughter Jamie Yutzie told The Washington Post.
The coronavirus is particularly deadly among older people, who suffer fatal complications at a higher rate than young people who catch it, but some elderly patients have beat it. A 95-year-old man, also in Oregon, recovered last month after mild symptoms. In Seattle, a 90-year-old woman recovered after catching the virus at the Life Care Center senior facility, the hardest-hit nursing home in the early days of the U.S. outbreak.