Centenarians hit hard by COVID-19
BOSTON — Centenarians have always been a rare breed. Now they’re an endangered species.
The 100-plus crowd — those most venerable of human beings — is succumbing rapidly and heartbreakingly to the coronavirus pandemic. Entire limbs are being lopped off family trees, and their wisdom and lore are dying with them.
“We’ve been really upset,” said Thomas Perls, a professor of medicine and geriatrics at Boston University who directs the New England Centenarian Study. “We’re seeing a higher rate of people passing away ... cutting these incredible lives shorter.”
“For families, they’re the pride and joy, the anchor, the link to the family’s history. They’re a huge big deal,” he said. “If you have a healthy centenarian who’s cognitively intact with no signs of Alzheimer’s, to me they’re practically immortal. COVID has interfered with that formula for sure.”
Reliable estimates of the numbers of centenarians who have perished in the pandemic are elusive, primarily because most state and government health agencies tracking deaths lump them into an 85-andolder demographic. That age bracket has seen more deaths than any other, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, the COVID-19 Tracking Project and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But anecdotal evidence, including newspaper and online death notices, suggests that COVID-19 is exacting a grim toll among the estimated 70,000 centenarians in the U.S. In tiny
Rhode Island alone, at least eight people aged 100 or older have died, public health officials say.
Carrie Hoza, of Northfield, Ill., lost her 101-yearold grandmother, Norma Bratschi Hoza, to COVID19 this month.
Born in 1919 to a mother who survived the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic, Ms. Bratschi Hoza married her childhood sweetheart and helped found the family’s plumbing business. When three neighborhood boys close in age to her own three sons were orphaned, she raised them as her own.
“She lived a beautiful life, with kindness and goodness in her heart,” said Ms. Hoza, 46. “She always believed that hatred was toxic and forgiveness was the best way to live. She was an absolute gem.”
Remarkably, some centenarians have recovered from COVID-19. Against all odds, 103-year-old Ada Zanusso battled back after being hospitalized in the northern Italian town of Lessona, crediting “courage and strength, faith” for her rebound.
But many of the very oldest of us are faring poorly in the pandemic.
“These are people who lived on the same block for 80 years, who taught school for 60 years, who never missed a church service,” said Neenah Ellis, who wrote the bestseller, “If I Live to Be 100: Lessons from the Centenarians.” “We’re all enriched by knowing these people.” Having cheated death for so long, they draw us in mysterious, almost totemic ways.
Mr. Perls, the human longevity expert, believes the planet is diminished with every centenarian lost: “We truly regard each one of them as a living historical treasure.”