None of those come close to Mr. Lewitinn’s streak, a combination, doctors say, of his physical and mental strength and the swiftness with which the medical establishment developed protocols for long-term Covid care.
“He had a long and difficult course,” Dr. Abraham Sanders, one of his physicians at Weill Cornell, wrote in an email. “He was a strong man and was the beneficiary of sophisticated medical care.”
Murad Albert Lewitinn was born on March 12, 1946, to a Jewish family in Cairo. (He Anglicized his first name to Marco as a child and later dropped the O.) His father, Albert Lewitinn, was a medical engineer, and his mother, Sarah (Amiga) Lewitinn, was a homemaker. He grew up speaking Arabic and later learned English, French and Spanish.
Egypt had a thriving Jewish community of 75,000 people, but they faced worsening conditions after the Arab nationalist revolution in 1952 and the Suez Crisis in 1956, which pitted the country against Israel, France and Britain. The government took over the elder Mr. Lewitinn’s business and, after being briefly detained, he and his family were expelled in 1958.
They settled in Baltimore, where Albert Lewitinn was hired by Johns Hopkins University to work on organ transplant technology.
As a young man Marc lived in New York City and Los Angeles, where he briefly attended college, then Paris, where he met Ondine Green, the sister of a childhood friend from Cairo. They married in 1968.
