President Donald Trump unexpectedly left the hospital where he is being treated for Covid-19 to greet supporters on Sunday, waving to them from his motorcade in a bid to demonstrate strength while yearning to return to the campaign trail.
Video footage showed a mask-wearing Trump waving from behind the closed window of a black sport-utility vehicle while supporters cheered. He then returned to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, where he has been since Friday, White House spokesman Judd Deere said.
In a video released on Twitter around the same time, Trump said he has learned a lot about the coronavirus while undergoing treatment. “This is the real school,” he said. “And I get it. And I understand it.” His outing, he said, was meant to pay a little surprise to his supporters.
Trumps doctors gave an upbeat assessment of his health as he recuperates from the virus infection, and one of them said he could be released from the hospital as early as Monday. Yet new disclosures about his treatment raise concern that his condition is more serious than what the American public has been told.
The President has continued to improve, the White House physician, Sean Conley, told reporters in a briefing by the medical team on Sunday morning. As with any illness, there are frequent ups and downs over the course.
Brian Garibaldi, a member of the presidents medical team and a pulmonary expert at Johns Hopkins University, said “Our hope is that we can plan for a discharge as early as tomorrow to the White House.”
On Sunday evening, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that Trump first tested positive after he returned from a fundraiser at his New Jersey golf resort on Thursday. “I am not giving a detailed readout of his testing. But safe to say, his first positive test was upon return or at least after Bedminster,” she said.
Although aides suggested that Trump would soon be ready to return to the campaign trail with the election just a month away, questions persist about how sick he has been as he heads into an phase where some patients conditions worsen suddenly and dramatically.
“We know that in many patients who do get very sick, it happens around day 8 to 10,” said Helen Boucher, chief of the division of geographic medicine and infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.
McEnany, too, expressed some caution.