Warsaw, December 5: Lech Walesa, Poland's 80-year-old former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been hospitalised with a bad case of COVID-19, an aide said Tuesday. A post on Walesa's Facebook shows him on a hospital bed with an oxygen mask on, with a caption that says “I have been hit by Covid.” The aide, Marek Kaczmar, told Polish media that Walesa is seriously ill, but under good care in a hospital in Gdansk, the Baltic port city where he lives.

It's Walesa's second bout of COVID. Starting in 1980, Walesa spearheaded Poland's pro-democracy Solidarity movement that nine years later led to the peaceful ouster of communism from Poland and inspired other countries to shed Moscow's domination. Poland: Opposition Holds Massive Rally in Warsaw, Video Shows Hundreds of Thousands of Protestors.

In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1990-95 he served as democratic Poland's first popularly elected president.

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