Oct. 4, 2020 – President Donald Trump could be discharged from the Walter Reed Military Medical Center as soon as Monday, his doctor said.
“Our plan for today is to have him eat and to drink to be up and out of bed as much as possible,” Brian Garbaldi, MD, told reporters. “[I]f he continues to look and feel as well as he does today our hope is to plan for a discharge as early as tomorrow to the White House to continue his treatment course.”
Cmdr. Sean Conley, DO, added that Trump, who has been in the hospital since Friday evening, “is really doing well.”
But Conley also said Trump, who was first diagnosed with coronavirus late Thursday, twice had low blood oxygen levels, once Friday and again Saturday. Only the Friday instance, however, required supplemental oxygen.
Still, in addition to continued injections of anti-malarial drug remdesivir, Conley said doctors have also started giving the president the steroid dexamethasone, which studies have shown may help reduce risk of death in hospitalized COVID patients.
Conley said Trump does not have a fever and is up and walking around the presidential suite at Walter Reed.
But Friday, he said, Trump had a “high” fever and oxygen levels below 94%. Although Trump insisted he didn’t need it, Conley said they gave him supplemental oxygten “for an hour, maybe, and then it was off and gone.”
Asked about Trump’s lung X-rays or scans, Conley said, “we’re tracking all of that. There are some findings but nothing of a major concern.”
He refused to respond to questions about what those findings were.
The president, who is at higher risk for severe illness because of his age and obesity, also received a dose of an experimental antibody therapy on Friday “as a precautionary measure,” Conley said Friday.
Regeneron, the company that makes the “antibody cocktail,” released early results of the therapy this week, saying the drugs tamped down symptoms and reduced viral load in COVID patients who were not in a hospital and who had not mounted their own immune response to the virus. The first study included just 275 patients. Another study is underway to confirm the findings.