Masked people, closed borders, a race for vaccines in the face of an effusion of variants… This is the world in which Joseph Flavill, a 19-year-old British teenager, woke up after ten months of coma.
"He will not know anything about the pandemic because he has been asleep for ten months," his aunt, Sally Flavill, told the Guardian.
It is March 1 - we are talking about a "mysterious Chinese virus" and the word coronavirus remains unpronounceable for many - when Joseph Flavill, a young athletic boy, is hit by a car while in Burton-on-Trent, in the south from Manchester, England.
The injuries are serious, the young man finds himself in a coma.
Three weeks later, on March 24, the United Kingdom decides on containment to curb the Covid-19 epidemic.
People adopt masks and hydroalcoholic gel.
At Leicester hospital, Joseph Flavill remains in a coma, changes hospitals and catches Covid-19, without knowing under what circumstances.
When he wakes up at the start of 2021, he doesn't know anything.
A complicated reunion
"How do you explain the pandemic to someone who has been in a coma?"
»Wonders in The Sun the aunt of the young man.
Only Joseph Flavill's mother can go to the hospital, at her son's bedside, because of the sanitary measures.
“We talk about it on the phone and try to make her realize that we really want to be there by holding her hand, but we just can't do it,” her aunt explains.
In rehabilitation, Joseph Flavill will have to slowly be made aware of the upheavals of the world.
His family, in order to support him and finance his convalescence, has set up an online kitty.
This Tuesday evening, she already collected more than 25,000 euros.
Released in 2003, “Good-Bye, Lenin!
Told the story of a mother, a staunch Communist, who after a heart attack fell into a coma in October 1989. Eight months later, when she came out, it was in a whole other world: the wall of Berlin has fallen.