In early October, a month before Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, he contracted COVID-19 and became the most visible novel coronavirus case in the world. And according to new reports, Trump’s battle with the disease and its symptoms was much worse than the public was initially told.
According to the New York Times, Trump’s condition rapidly deteriorated, and there was talk of him being hooked up to a ventilator before he was moved to Walter Reed for further treatment:
His prognosis became so worrisome before he was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center that officials believed he would need to be put on a ventilator, two of the people familiar with his condition said.
The people familiar with Mr. Trump’s health said he was found to have lung infiltrates, which occur when the lungs are inflamed and contain substances such as fluid or bacteria. Their presence, especially when a patient is exhibiting other symptoms, can be a sign of an acute case of the disease.
Trump’s doctors at Walter Reed famously downplayed Trump’s case and treatments, withholding medical information about his oxygen levels and what medications he had been prescribed until days after they were administered. But the Times report says that Trump’s oxygen levels plunged “into the 80s” when anything in the low 90s is considered a serious medical issue. The report has more details about the Trump administration’s frantic search for a treatment program not yet approved by the FDA called Regeneron, which helped Trump recover. There may even have been some Regeneron in the White House when he left office:
Regeneron shipped a package of doses that included extras, “in case of any administration issues,” a company spokeswoman said.
The extras were never returned. Dr. Conley at one point told associates they had been sitting in a refrigerator in the White House’s medical office.
The new details don’t change what happened in the Trump administration in October, but it does reassure plenty of people who felt like something was off about the way everything played out. Trump was much sicker than he wanted anyone to know, and despite months of downplaying the pandemic’s severity and impact on millions of Americans, it took the best healthcare in the country to save Trump’s life when it inevitably started spreading in the White House.
[via NY Times]