Primetta Giacopini’s life began and ended with pandemics. The 105-year-old California woman was two years old when she lost her mother to the flu in Connecticut in 1918. A foster family took her back to their ancestral home in Italy, where she survived as a seamstress until she was forced to flee in 1941 as Benito Mussolini purged the country of Americans. She returned to Connecticut, where she worked in a factory grinding steel for the U.S. war effort. She moved to San Jose in the 1970s, where she lived until she contracted COVID-19 earlier this month. She struggled with the disease for a week before she died Sept. 16.
Woman who survived 1918 flu, world war succumbs to COVID
