New Delhi: A 105-year-old woman from Afghanistan beat all odds of high mortality rate among elderly population to recover from COVID-19 on Friday giving much hope to the overworked medical fraternity and the infected as well.
Rabia Ahmed, an Afghan citizen was discharged from a hospital in Greater Noida on Friday after being on the ventilator for seven days.
The centenarian was admitted to the private Sharda Hospital on July 16 in a "life-threatening condition" after getting infected with the novel coronavirus.
She had tested positive for the infection at a private hospital in Noida after which she was brought to Sharda Hospital, a dedicated COVID-19 facility.
She was tested again on Thursday and the result came out to be negative, paving the way for her discharge on Friday ahead of the Islamic festival of Bakrid, hospital officials said.
Ahmed, who hails from Kabul in Afghanistan, had come to visit her grandchildren who are living in Noida earlier this year but eventually got stuck in the lockdown, they said.
"When the patient was brought, she had fever, severe breathlessness and pneumonia. She was also suffering from Alzheimer's. She was unable to identify any relatives also when she was admitted here," Dr Ashutosh Niranjan, the medical superintendent of Sharda Hospital, said.
"She had urinal infection and her ECG was also abnormal. The patient was in a critical state and immediately shifted on ventilator support. She was suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)," Niranjan said.
The treatment started in compliance with the protocols laid by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and the hospital's own norms for COVID-19, he said.