When US President Joe Biden tested positive for Covid-19 last week, the dog stayed with him. The cat went with his wife.
Biden’s long-awaited, heavily-planned “as yet to come” Covid-19 infection turned the White House residence briefly into a ward for a single high-profile patient who, aides say, spent the hectic weekend going insane. by isolation.
His wife went to Delaware, bringing her new shorthaired tabby with her. The staff inside the executive mansion was reduced to the most essential personnel, who Biden feared could contract the highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus that likely infected him.
And even the cart of video equipment didn’t make it into the second-floor Treatise Room, phone calls from her grandchildren and a pile of books about Ireland couldn’t keep cabin fever from setting in.
“I’m only a few hundred meters away,” Biden told visitors to South Korea on Tuesday, who heard him speak on a screen in the Roosevelt Room. “I could look out from the porch and yell at you!”
When the meeting ended, he took off his jacket and stepped onto the Truman Balcony to do just that.
By Tuesday, Biden was feeling well enough to get back to working out at the White House gym — a daily routine he had interrupted during his recovery. Instead of waking up to exercise, his German Shepherd Commander served as an alarm clock on Monday when – in the First Lady’s absence – he woke the Commander-in-Chief just before 7am.
“My wife is not here,” Biden explained a few hours later. “She usually hangs out with him in the morning while I’m upstairs working out.”
Long seen as an inevitability, Biden’s fight with Covid-19 marked a turning point. Some of Biden’s team expressed silent relief at what most had hoped would finally happen — without, for the time being, major health complications.
For a White House whose operations were designed — from its earliest days — to keep the septuagenarian commander-in-chief from falling ill, Biden’s aides saw the illness as a sign that even the most protected person can contract Covid and be fine.
Early in his tenure, Biden’s meetings were held with the smallest groups of employees possible, all wearing color-coordinated wristbands to indicate that they had been tested for coronavirus that day. Masks were required everywhere in the White House in the early months of the Biden administration. Traveling outside of Washington was rare.
The president’s inner circle was so tight that when a long line of Washington officials — including the vice president, secretary of state, attorney general, speaker of the House and several high-ranking Biden aides, including the press secretary and the national security adviser – tested positive, none were determined not to be in “close contact” with Biden.
Concerns about the president contracting the disease were partly rooted in his age; at age 79, he is at increased risk of serious illness. But some Democrats also wonder how getting sick could affect Biden’s political standing, given the increasingly frequent questions about whether he will be too old for a second term.
However, life in the bubble did not please Biden, who chafed at the limitations imposed on a job he had been aiming for over the previous four decades. Pitfalls like state dinners and medal ceremonies have been suspended. And perhaps most irritating to the famous tactile president, visitors were rare.
Restrictions began to ease as vaccines became available and the virus began to show signs of waning. Even episodes of variant-driven resurgence haven’t stopped Biden from starting to live more freely.
The day before the positive test, Biden flew back and forth to Massachusetts for a speech on climate change. Photos aboard Air Force One showed he was not wearing a mask as he interacted with lawmakers invited to the trip.
He shook hands before and after the event, but it didn’t take long due to the scorching sun and high temperatures. But this was an exception. As he begins to travel more across the country, Biden has spent up to 45 minutes greeting the audience with handshakes and hugs after his speeches.
When he returned to the White House on Wednesday night, however, he began to feel tired. A busy night and two tests later, Biden became the second acting US president to test positive for Covid-19.
His symptoms — runny nose, sore throat, high temperature, body aches — were all considered mild, which the White House attributed to his four shots of vaccine. But the rules were still the rules, and Biden entered the necessary period of isolation as his team began executing a plan that had been in place for months, starting with a quick public announcement.
Many White House officials only learned from this disclosure that the president had Covid.
“We said some time ago that there was a substantial possibility that the president – like anyone else – could get Covid, and we prepared for that possibility. We are now executing our plan so the president can continue to work. perfectly from home,” Chief of Staff Ron Klain wrote in a memo to staff a few hours after the initial statement.
Facing reporters this week, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was joined by the White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha rather than the doctor who actually saw Biden. Jha, who had not examined the President, FaceTimed him throughout his illness and received updates from Presidential Doctor Kevin O’Connor.
Reporters protested that they could not directly question O’Connor. Jha said that neither Biden nor O’Connor explicitly ruled against O’Connor delivering the communiqués.
O’Connor, a retired Army colonel who has treated Biden for several years, is not a seasoned presence on television or during public question-and-answer sessions, one official said. He has a loose, playful way with Biden and other top officials — sometimes using humor to cut serious moments, including when Biden’s son Beau was diagnosed with cancer — but he doesn’t normally get involved with the press.
However, Jha regularly appeared as a medical commentator on Covid before joining the White House earlier this year.
During former President Donald Trump’s fight against Covid in 2020, then-White House physician Sean Conley briefed reporters from the steps of Walter Reed National Medical Center, where Trump was hospitalized.
Conley, it was later learned, obscured the severity of Trump’s illness during his statements.
It was not until former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows published his memoirs at the White House that Trump’s oxygen level had dropped to about 86% – dangerously below the normal level.
O’Connor, in daily written updates distributed by the White House press office, did not disclose Biden’s oxygenation rate other than saying that his “oxygen saturation remains excellent in ambient air.” He also described Biden’s pulse, blood pressure and respiratory rates as “normal”, without disclosing any numbers.
White House officials said these vitals were being recorded throughout the day and never deviated from normal levels. And they argued that because the president’s symptoms were mild, his level of transparency was appropriate.
“We provided, I think, an extraordinary amount of transparency about his care: when he tested positive; how he behaves each day; the evolving nature of his symptoms: is your runny nose a little worse, a little better?” Jha told reporters on Monday. “Like, we’ve been very, very open and transparent with all this data.”
The White House was forced to cancel a number of out-of-town events, including a political rally in Tampa, Florida, which had been seen as something of a debut for the president’s upcoming midterm message.
A speech to a group of black executives that Biden planned to give in person in Orlando went virtual. He used the speech to accuse his predecessor of cowardice during the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, a statement that aides hoped he would deliver to a packed and sympathetic audience.
Instead, Biden recorded the speech from the Treaty Room, where he spent much of his days in isolation. The video released by the White House on Monday was edited at various times as Biden continued to cough.
By Tuesday, however, Biden had already lost his husky voice.
“I hope I’m as good as I feel,” Biden told a group via videoconference. “I never look this good. I hope I’m as good as I usually am, which isn’t so good.”
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
