A 103-year-old Italian says ‘courage, faith’ helped her beat the coronavirus.

Ada Zanusso lives at the Maria Grazia Residence for the elderly in Lessona, a town in the northern region of Piedmont. Her family doctor of 35 years, Carla Furno Marchese, said he thought she wasn’t going to make it because she was always drowsy and not reacting.

“One day she opened her eyes again and resumed doing what she used to before,” Furno Marchese said.

When asked by an Associated Press reporter what helped her get through the illness? “Courage and strength, faith,” Zanusso said. It worked for her, so she advises others who fall ill to also “give yourself courage, have faith.”

Meanwhile, in the UK a prominent conservationist who chairs a global campaign to stop tropical deforestation, has recounted a vivid spiritual experience while he battled the coronavirus. Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Hylton Murray-Philipson, 61, who had spent five days in intensive care, many of them on a ventilator, said that in the moment of his greatest distress and struggle whilst in intensive care, he had a powerful image of Jesus calming the storm on the sea of Galilee. “I would like to think that was Jesus Christ coming to me, and helping me in my hour of need,” he said.