Joseph Flavill doesn’t remember having tested positive for coronavirus last year nor does he remember anything that happened during the last eleven months.
The 19-year-old Briton has been in a coma since March 1, 2020, after suffering a traumatic brain injury when the student was hit by a car while walking down the street in his hometown, Monday reported Staffordshire Live for the first time. It would be three weeks in late March before the UK enters its first national pandemic blockade.
“We also don’t know how much he understands his accident before the first closure and it’s almost as if he’s slept through the entire pandemic,” Joseph’s aunt Sally Flavill Smith said in a statement.
Much of Flavill’s family has not been allowed to see him in person due to pandemic security restrictions at Adderley Green, a rehabilitation center where he was taken after waking up at General Hospital. Leicester, where he had been incarcerated since last year.
“How do you explain the pandemic to someone who has been in a coma?” asked Smith, whose nephew has also tested positive for COVID-19 twice (once unconscious and again during rehab) and has recovered.
“We try to make it as simple as possible,” Smith also told The Guardian. “We don’t really have time to get into the pandemic enormously; it just doesn’t feel real, does it? When you can really have face-to-face contact, this will be an opportunity to try to tell you what happened.”
For now, the family is visiting Flavill via video call, although in December she was granted a brief visit home to celebrate her 19th birthday with her mother, Sharon Priestley, but with personal protective equipment and staying in a safe social distance.
While it is far from fully recovering, Flavill’s cognitive and motor functions are slowly returning, Smith said. “We still have a long way to go, but the steps he’s taken in the last three weeks have been absolutely incredible.”