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• Elena Manighetti and Ryan Osborne, formerly of Manchester, England, followed their dream and have been sailing around the world on their boat since 2017.
They were en route from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, where they planned to dock on a small island in mid-March, but were surprised to discover the island's borders were closed because of a worldwide pandemic.
"In February, we'd heard there was a virus in China, but ... we had figured by the time we got to the Caribbean in 25 days it would all be over," Elena told the BBC.
The couple had told friends and family they didn't want to hear any bad news, but Elena is from the hard-hit Lombardy region of Italy and has since caught up with her family.
"It's a very macabre picture at home, there are no more coffins, no more cemetery space. ... My family is thankfully safe ... but people we've known for years have died," Elena said.
The couple was eventually able to dock in Saint Vincent, and they hope to head north before hurricane season starts in June.
"We're sandwiched between the hurricane season and the virus," Elena said. [BBC, 4/21/2020]
• An unnamed 22-year-old Chinese woman has spent the last 14 years trying to discover the cause of her persistent cough, which started when she suffered a serious fit of coughing as a child, Oddity Central reported on April 22.
Over the years, she has been misdiagnosed numerous times, but as she recently prepared for an unrelated surgery, the mystery was solved.
Dr. Wang Jiyong at Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine ordered CT scans that revealed a foreign object in her right lung that turned out to be a chicken bone fragment just over half an inch long.
Doctors said she had probably inhaled it at 8 years old, when the coughing started. [Oddity Central, 4/22/2020]