President Donald Trump said he would leave the hospital on Monday where he has been treated for COVID-19, returning to a White House hit by a wave of infections and a campaign further shadowed by the pandemic four weeks before Election Day, Reuters reported.
Trump was admitted to a military hospital outside Washington on Friday after being diagnosed with the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
“I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” he said on Twitter.
Trump, 74, has not had a fever in more than 72 hours and his oxygen levels are normal, his medical team said in a briefing in front of the hospital. The doctors declined, however, to discuss any potential toll the disease could have on the President’s lungs or disclose when Trump last tested negative for the coronavirus.
The team added that the President had received supplemental oxygen twice in recent days.
“He may not entirely be out of the woods yet,” Dr. Sean. P. Conley, the White House physician, told reporters. He added, however, that the President would be surrounded by world-class medical care around the clock at the White House.
Conley said doctors were in “unchartered territory” because Trump had received certain therapies so early in the course of the illness.
The severity of Trump’s illness has been the subject of intense speculation in the past three days, with some medical experts noting that, as an overweight, elderly man, he was in a category more likely to develop severe complications or die from the disease.
Doctors also have been treating him with a steroid, dexmethasone, that is normally used only in the most severe cases.
Trump has frequently downplayed the threat of the pandemic, which has infected 7.4 million people in the United States and killed more than 209,000. In recent days, he released a series of videos to reassure the public he is recovering from COVID-19.
He was reluctant to go to the hospital last week and is eager to get out, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters earlier on Monday.
U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she hoped Trump’s decision to return to the White House was not politically motivated and she expressed concern that he could become a “long hauler,” a term that refers to those who suffer COVID-19 complications over an extended period.
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