A UK teenager woke up from a coma for about 11 months, prompting his family to weigh in on how the coronavirus pandemic will be explained to him, according to reports this week.
Joseph Flavill, 19, of Staffordshire, suffered a severe brain injury after being hit by a car on March 1, 2020, about three weeks before the UK entered its first national blockade.
“He will know nothing about the pandemic since he has been sleeping for 10 months,” his aunt, Sally Flavill Smith, told the Guardian on Tuesday. “A year ago, if someone had told me what was going to happen last year, I don’t think they would have believed it. I have no idea how Joseph is going to understand what we all went through.”
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The teenager spent months at Leicester General Hospital before being transferred to the Adderley Green neurological rehabilitation center in Stoke-on-Trent.
During that time, he caught the coronavirus twice and recovered.
Flavill Smith said the family has not yet tried to explain the scale of the pandemic, but have tried to inform him via video calls that they cannot be with him personally due to the virus’s restrictions.
“We really don’t have time to enter the huge pandemic – it just doesn’t seem real, does it? When he can really have face-to-face contact, this will be an opportunity to really try to explain to him what happened,” said Flavill Smith, according to the news site.
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Although he is not fully recovered, the teenager has started to move his limbs and is responding to the family by winking and smiling, his family said.
“We still have a long way to go, but the steps he has taken in the past three weeks have been absolutely incredible,” added Flavill Smith.
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Earlier on Wednesday, the family raised nearly £ 33,000 (about $ 40,000) to support Flavill in his long-term recovery.