Trump could face a relapse, Dr. Fauci warns, as president opts to downplay nation’s coronavirus threat despite massive death toll
President Donald Trump rolled out of Walter Reed hospital confidently urging the nation not to fear the coronavirus despite experts warning the U.S. death toll, at more than 210,000, could almost double by year’s end.
They also warn that the commander-in-chief himself may not have seen the worst of the virus just yet.
“Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted hours before his release Monday following a three-day hospital stay. “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!”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who for months has exhorted the nation to wear masks and social distance, said Trump could face a relapse. Fauci is not involved in caring for Trump but said the president and his physicians are fully aware of all the possibilities.
“It’s no secret that if you look at the clinical course of people, sometimes when you’re five to eight days in, you can have a reversal,” Fauci told CNN on Monday night. “A reversal meaning, going in the wrong direction and get into trouble.”
Fauci called such an event unlikely, but said everyone involved needs “to be heads up for it. He knows it, the physicians know it.”
Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, an intensive care doctor for Northwell health in New York, says the danger window can easily stretch to 10 days.
“Saying that he beat COVID now is extremely premature, especially for someone his age,” Narasimhan told USA TODAY. “He is not out of the woods yet.”
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White House physician Sean Conley said Trump would continue his treatment regimen at the White House, where he will receive “24/7 world-class medical care.” The president will continue taking his five-day course of remdesivir, an antiviral drug, as well as the steroid dexamethasone.
Much of the nation, however, does not have premium medical care. That is particularly true among lower-income Americans and people of color – people most at risk for poor outcomes from the virus, says Dr. Lucy McBride, an internal medicine doctor at Foxhall Internists in Washington, D.C.
“They are also at increased risk for mental health challenges – what I am calling a parallel pandemic – that directly inform our physical health,” she said.
More than 210,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 as of Tuesday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. There have been almost 7.5 million confirmed cases.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent global health research center at the University of Washington, forecasts that the U.S. death toll will exceed 363,000 by year’s end alone.
“If we keep failing to take this pandemic seriously, 200,000 more lives will be lost by the end of this year,” said Dennis Carroll, who led the pandemic unit at the federal Agency for International Development for nearly 15 years. “Fact-denying rhetoric from the president … only ensures these deaths will come. Even with better treatments.”
There has been bits of encouraging data. The IHME has lowered its projections from more than 400,000 a month ago. COVID-19 hospitalizations nationwide have leveled off in the last month at about 30,000, still alarming but about half the number seen during the peak in July.
In South Dakota, the relatively low hospitalization rate prompted Gov. Kristi Noem to assert that her resistance to statewide stay-at-home orders has paid off – even as South Dakota has struggled with the second-highest number of new coronavirus cases per capita among states over the last two weeks.
A USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins data through late Monday shows a record numbers of deaths were reported over the last seven days in three states – including South Dakota.
“Until we can boldly say … that we have measures in place to finally contain the disease in terms of its threat to the general population, we should not rest on our oars,” said Ogbonnaya Omenka, an associate professor and public health specialist at Butler University.
Contributing: Michael Stucka
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