Trump enters hospital with Covid, jolting poll campaign

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump remains in a US military hospital outside Washington after contracting the coronavirus, a development that unnerved the White House and shook his struggling re-election campaign.
The White House said his symptoms were mild and that he would continue to work from a suite at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, but his hospitalisation heightened fears that his condition was more serious.
The president’s physician, Sean Conley, said that Trump was being treated with the antiviral drug Remdesivir and did not require oxygen.
Trump spoke in a video he tweeted out to thank Americans for their well-wishes. “I think I’m doing very well but we’re going to make sure that things work out,” he said.
But as the day wore on, more and more prominent people in political circles revolving around Trump tested positive for the virus. They included his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, two Republican senators and a former top White House aide, Kellyanne Conway.
That Trump, who is wary of doctors, agreed to go to Walter Reed is a sign of concern about his condition, several people familiar with the matter said. Within the White House, several aides said they had received no more information about Trump’s condition than the public.
There will be no transfer of power from Trump to Vice President Mike Pence while the president is in the hospital, White House spokesman Judd Deere said.
The helicopter flight to Walter Reed was the most dramatic moment in a day of dizzying developments in Washington sparked by the president’s disclosure of his illness just a month before Election Day. As the Trump campaign was scrapping most of its planned events, the president’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, was campaigning in the battleground state of Michigan, where he delivered a speech while wearing a face mask.
Biden, who took part in a chaotic debate with Trump, expressed wishes for a speedy recovery for both Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, who also tested positive for the coronavirus, and said the diagnosis was a “bracing reminder” to take the disease seriously.
Fresh anxiety over the virus continued to reverberate. Stepien, who was promoted to run the campaign this summer to help revive Trump’s re-election bid, has been infected, a campaign spokesman said.
Conway, who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign before joining the administration, said she had tested positive. “My symptoms are mild (light cough) and I’m feeling fine.
I have begun a quarantine process in consultation with physicians,” Conway, who left the White House in August, wrote on Twitter.
The two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina said that they, too, had tested positive. Both sit on the Judiciary Committee, which is preparing for hearings on Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. The senators and Conway attended
the Rose Garden ceremony in which Trump announced Barrett’s selection.