Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai recovers from Covid-19, husband Abhishek Bachchan still in hospital
- Aishwarya Rai and her daughter are now at home after being discharged from a Mumbai hospital
- Together with her actor husband Abhishek Bachchan and his superstar father Amitabh Bachchan, they are the highest-profile family to contract Covid-19 in India
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Bollywood star and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and her daughter have been discharged from a Mumbai hospital where they were being treated for coronavirus.
“Aishwarya and Aaradhya have thankfully tested negative and have been discharged from the hospital. They will now be at home,” her husband tweeted, thanking fans for “continued prayers and good wishes”.
“My father and I remain in hospital under the care of the medical staff,” he said.
The actor added the recovery of his wife and daughter left him unable to “hold back tears”.
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Aishwarya and her eight-year-old daughter Aaradhya were initially quarantining at home before being moved to the same hospital where her 77-year-old father-in-law and his son are being treated for the illness.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan won the Miss World crown in 1994, and since then became one of Bollywood’s most famous faces. She is a regular on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival.
The elder Bachchan and his 44-year-old son Abhishek are both in the hospital’s isolation ward.
No health update has been issued since they were admitted more than two weeks ago but Amitabh, an avid social media user, has been dispensing regular messages to his millions of fans on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
“I couldn’t hold back my tears”, he tweeted late Monday, recounting his reaction to the news that his granddaughter and daughter-in-law could now go home.
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A blog entry posted earlier on Saturday touched on the mental trauma and stigma suffered by novel coronavirus patients, referring to “the stark reality that the Covid patient, put in hospitalised isolation, never gets to see another human”.
Recovered patients “are afraid to be in public for fear or apprehension of being treated differently … treated as one that has carried the disease … a pariah syndrome … driving them into deeper depression”, he wrote.
Amitabh Bachchan, idolised in India and affectionately known as “Big B”, has worked for more than half a century in the film industry.
He was voted “actor of the millennium” in a BBC online poll in 1999 and became the first Indian actor to be showcased at Madame Tussauds celebrity wax museum in London.
Mumbai, India’s financial and film capital, has now recorded over 100,000 cases, with more than 6,000 deaths attributed to the virus.
