‘HER TIME’

She Survived the 1918 Flu Pandemic—but Not COVID-19

Arkansas nursing home resident dies at age 107, with coronavirus listed as a factor.

A 107-year-old nursing home resident who contracted the new coronavirus in an Arkansas nursing home appeared to fight it off but then died last week. COVID-19 won’t be listed as the primary cause of Mary Blount’s death but as a contributing factor, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. Blount was born in 1912 and lived through the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide. For the past 16 years, she has been living at the Briarwood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Little Rock. Thirty-four residents there were eventually infected with COVID-19, but Blount had only mild symptoms. But weeks after they disappeared, her organs began to shut down and she stopped eating, dying peacefully on April 4. “We feel like she didn’t die of COVID-19,” her granddaughter Julie Andrews told the newspaper. “It was just her time."