US President Donald Trump’s condition yesterday remained clouded by confusion over his treatment for COVID-19, with the president’s effort to show strength contradicted by conflicting accounts from his doctors that raise doubts about how soon he will be able return to work and his re-election campaign.
Trump on Sunday made a surprise outing from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, waving to supporters gathered outside from his motorcade and saying in a video posted on Twitter that he had learned a lot about the virus.
“I get it,” he said.
Photo: AFP
He returned to Twitter more energetically yesterday morning, with a slew of all-caps posts urging supporters to vote.
A member of his medical team, Brian Garibaldi, a pulmonary expert at Johns Hopkins University, said at a briefing on Sunday that the president could be released from the hospital as soon yesterday.
However, the White House physician, Sean Conley, disclosed for the first time that Trump had been given oxygen and has received a medication that is typically used for more severe COVID-19 patients.
Conley also revealed that Trump’s blood-oxygen saturation level dropped twice since his diagnosis, and that the president’s medical team decided to administer dexamethasone, a steroid used to treat inflammation in COVID patients.
Asked about X-rays and computed tomography scans of the president’s lungs, Conley said there were “some expected findings,” but nothing “of any major clinical concern.”
Asked why he did not disclose during Saturday’s briefing that Trump had received oxygen despite repeated questions about it, Conley said: “I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude” of the team and the president.
The questions about Trump’s treatment and recovery, as well as demands for more complete disclosure about his health, come amid the prospect of a widening outbreak among White House and campaign staff and Senate Republicans, even as campaign aides predicted the president would soon be back on the campaign trail.
Trump did not immediately provide an update on his condition yesterday in a number of campaign tweets, focusing instead on the stock market’s climb during his term and the threat of economic damage from his challenger’s policies.
Meanwhile, Trump’s motorcade ride sparked criticism that he was putting others at risk for a political stunt.
White House spokesman Judd Deere described the drive as a “short, last-minute motorcade ride to wave to his supporters” and said that “appropriate precautions were taken” to protect the president and those supporting him.
However, an attending physician at Walter Reed disagreed.
“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” James Phillips, who is also an assistant professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine, wrote on Twitter. “They might get sick. They may die. For political theater.”
US Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat, added that he was praying for the health of Trump’s Secret Service security detail: “They understood the risk inherent in the job, but they shouldn’t have to contemplate that the risk is coming from the protectee.”
Additional reporting by Reuters
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