White House physician, Dr Sean Conley has announced US President, Donald Trump has completed his course of treatment for Covid-19 and can return to public engagements this weekend.
In a statement from the White House, Dr Conley said Trump had “responded extremely well to treatment” and that “since returning home, his physical exam has remained stable and devoid of any indications to suggest progression of illness”.
Dr Conley added that Saturday marks 10 days since Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 on October 1, and he “fully anticipate[s] the president’s safe return to public engagements at that time”.
According to guidelines from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a person who tests positive for COVID-19 can be around others again 10 days after his or her symptoms first appeared provided the infected person’s symptoms have improved and they have gone 24 hours “with no fever without the use of fever-reducing medications.”
Dr Conley also mentioned that if the president’s condition remained the same or improved throughout the weekend and into Monday, “we will all take that final, deep sigh of relief”.
President Donald Trump later said he would probably take another Covid test on Friday and hoped to hold a rally over the weekend.
“I think I’m going to try doing a rally on Saturday night, if we have enough time to put it together, but we want to do a rally… probably in Florida on Saturday night, might come back and do one in Pennsylvania in the following night,” he said.
But although his doctor has said he now has no symptoms, questions still remain about when the president first became infected and whether he could still be contagious. More than two dozen of Mr Trump’s close aides, political allies and White House staff have tested positive for COVID-19 in the outbreak.
“At this point, there’s no diagnostic test that tells you whether a person that’s infected remains infectious,” Dr Benjamin Pinsky, who leads Stanford University’s virology labs, told reporters. “There is absolutely a chain of unknowns.”
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said two negative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) lab tests 24 hours apart are a key factor in determining whether someone is still contagious.
“So, if the president goes 10 days without symptoms, and they do the tests that we were talking about, then you could make the assumption, based on good science, that he is not infected,” he said.
President Trump was admitted to hospital on 2nd October, after he announced he had contracted the coronavirus, in a diagnosis that has drawn attention to his administration’s handling of the pandemic.
Mr Trump has insisted “somebody got in and people got infected” but given no more details.
One of the top Republicans, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, has said that he had not been to the White House since 6 August because its approach to handling Covid with social distancing and masks was “different from mine and what I suggested we do in the Senate”.
