Donald Trump's doctor offered a different account of the president's health to the White House chief-of-staff. The president has released a video saying he was better.

President Donald Trump tried to allay supporters' concerns about his health on Saturday evening by releasing a four-minute video saying he felt much better after treatment following his positive test for COVID-19, and that doctors at the Walter Reed Medical Center were "working hard to get me all the way back."

In the video, posted on Trump's Twitter account, the president added that his wife Melania was "really handling it very nicely," after her own diagnosis with the virus.

The video came after a day of mixed messages from official channels about the president's health, as well as confusion about when exactly he had been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.

The president's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, told the press outside the Walter Reed military hospital on Saturday morning that the 74-year-old's symptoms had abated, that his fever had gone down and that he was not being given extra oxygen.

But Conley refused to say whether the president had ever needed supplemental oxygen, despite repeated questioning, and declined to say how high a fever Trump had been running before it came back down to a normal range.

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/official-sources-offer-contradictory-accounts-of-donald-trumps-health/a-55149659

President Trump’s doctors offered rosy assessments of his condition on Sunday, but the few medical details they disclosed — including his fluctuating oxygen levels and a decision to begin treatment with a steroid drug — suggested to many infectious disease experts that he is suffering a more severe case of Covid-19 than the physicians acknowledged.

In photos and videos released by the White House, there is hardly any sign that Mr. Trump is sick. But at a news conference at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Mr. Trump’s doctors said his oxygen levels had dropped to a level that can indicate that a patient's lungs are compromised. The symptom is seen in many patients with severe Covid-19.

The president’s medical team also said that he had been prescribed dexamethasone on Saturday. The drug is a steroid used to head off an immune system overreaction that kills many Covid-19 patients.

The drug is reserved for those with severe illness, because it has not been shown to benefit those with milder forms of the disease and may even be risky.

Because of the incomplete picture offered by the president’s doctors, it was not clear whether they had given him dexamethasone too quickly, or whether the president was far sicker than has been publicly acknowledged, experts in infectious disease and emergency medicine said on Sunday.

“The dexamethasone is the most mystifying of the drugs we’re seeing him being given at this point,” said Dr. Thomas McGinn, physician-in-chief at Northwell Health, the largest health care provider in New York State. The drug is normally not used unless the patient’s condition seems to be deteriorating, he added.

“Suddenly, they’re throwing the kitchen sink at him,” Dr. McGinn said. “It raises the question: Is he sicker than we’re hearing, or are they being overly aggressive because he is the president, in a way that could be potentially harmful?”

Dr. Esther Choo, a professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, said of the doctors’ statements on Sunday: “This is no longer aspirationally positive. And it’s much more than just an ‘abundance of caution’ kind of thing.”

Some experts raised an additional possibility: that the president is directing his own care, and demanding intense treatment despite risks he may not fully understand. The pattern even has a name: V.I.P. syndrome, which describes prominent figures who receive poor medical care because doctors are too zealous in treating them — or defer too readily to their instructions.

“You think you’re helping,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, a clinical assistant professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine. “But this is really a data-free zone, and you just don’t know that.”

Still, based on the doctors’ account, Mr. Trump’s symptoms appear to have rapidly progressed since he announced early Friday morning that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Mr. Trump had a “high fever” on Friday, and there were two occasions when his blood oxygen levels dropped, his doctors said — on Friday and again on Saturday. The president’s oxygen saturation level was 93 percent at one point, his doctors said, below the 95 percent that is considered the lower limit of the normal range.

Many medical experts consider patients to have severe Covid-19 if their oxygen levels drop below 94 percent. The physicians said Mr. Trump had received supplemental oxygen at the White House on Friday; they were not clear about whether it had been administered again on Saturday, or whether his blood oxygen levels had fallen below 90 at some point.

On Friday, Mr. Trump was given an infusion of an experimental antibody cocktail that is being tested in Covid-19 patients by the drugmaker Regeneron. Mr. Trump is also receiving a five-day course of remdesivir, another experimental drug that is used in hospitalized patients and has been granted emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.

Regeneron’s antibody cocktail is being tested in patients early in the course of the infection, because the treatment fights the virus itself and may prevent it from spreading throughout the body.

Remdesivir is also an antiviral and is already commonly used with dexamethasone, which tamps down the body’s immune response and is given later in the illness, when some patients’ immune systems go into overdrive and attack their vital organs.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/health/trump-covid-treatment.html

MSNBC liberal talk show host Joy Reid suggested Friday that President Donald Trump lied about his COVID-19 diagnosis just to “get out of the debates.” 

Reid has always been a propagandist never Trumper but she knows better than making up this kind of disgusting lie because of course her pseudo news network had already confirmed the diagnosis.

Read more:

https://saraacarter.com/msnbc-host-with-tds-joy-reid-insinuates-trump-faked-his-covid-19-diagnosis/

The US president's former lawyer has told the BBC Donald Trump will return to the White House with an "identical understanding" of coronavirus despite his diagnosis.

Michael Cohen said Mr Trump's understanding is "predicated on ignorance and arrogance", claiming the president thinks he can bully Covid-19.

Mr Cohen is under house arrest after being convicted for crimes including Trump campaign finance violations.

See more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-54428603

Meanwhile:

Oct 5 (Reuters) - A spate of dealmaking activity lifted European stocks in early trade on Monday along with an upbeat global mood on positive updates of U.S. President Donald Trump’s health.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.7% by 0717 GMT, adding to a near-2% gain last week.

Oil majors Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total gained nearly 2%, with crude prices climbing after an easing of the worst fears about Trump’s health condition and an expanding workers’ strike in Norway, Western Europe’s largest oil producer.

Spanish bank Unicaja gained 6.0% after a source told Reuters that it and Liberbank were holding informal talks about a potential tie-up to create the country’s fifth-biggest lender.

German fertiliser group K+S jumped 13.5% after Bloomberg reported it was in advanced talks to sell its Morton Salt unit to Kissner Group for about $3 billion.

Read more:

https://in.reuters.com/article/europe-stocks/dealmaking-trumps-health-update-boost-european-stocks-idUSL4N2GW1D8

Read from top...

Facebook and Twitter have removed posts by Donald Trump in which he downplays the danger of the coronavirus by again comparing it to the seasonal flu.

In response, the US President has called for the repeal of Section 230, a part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which allows internet companies to delete content they judge to be harmful.

If Democrats, the American public – and even Trump campaign advisers – were hoping the President would learn from his own virus experience, it looks as if they will be sorely disappointed.

On Tuesday (local time), he told Americans not to be afraid of COVID-19. Then he took to social media to repeat false claims the coronavirus is less lethal for most people than seasonal influenza.

He wrote that COVID-19 is “far less lethal” than the flu. He said Americans “have learned to live with” the flu “just like we are learning to live with COVID”.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2020/10/07/facebook-twitter-trump-post/

The flu killed him last year, so he knows Covid isn't as bad...

Read from top. See also:

dr. strangebum or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the virus (2020)