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Speaking on CNN, Dr. Anthony Fauci, U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime COVID-19 taskforce lead, warned Trump’s condition could yet get worse as the days go on.
Trump is now back at the White House following a stay in hospital, and has made a point of telling Americans not to be afraid of the coronavirus. But speaking to CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, Fauci said appearances can be deceptive when it comes to the deadly illness, and Trump could yet have cause for concern himself.
“He looks fine. The issue is that it is still early enough in the disease,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“If you look at the clinical course of people … sometimes when you’re five to eight days in, you’re going to have a reversal. A reversal meaning, going in the wrong direction, and (you) get into trouble. It’s unlikely that it will happen, but they need to be heads-up for it.”
Fauci said he felt Trump’s recovery was aided, while in hospital, by doses of an antibody drug previously used to fight Ebola, called Regeneron.
“Whether or not it was that that got him better, I’m strongly suspicious that it was,” he said.
Trump faced a backlash on Tuesday for removing his mask when he returned to the White House and urging Americans not to fear the disease that has killed more than 209,000 people in the country and put him in hospital.
Trump arrived at the White House on Monday in a made-for-television spectacle in which he descended from his Marine One helicopter wearing a white surgical mask, only to remove it as he posed, saluting and waving, on the mansion’s South Portico.
“Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it,” Trump said in a video after his return from the Walter Reed Medical Center military hospital outside Washington where he was admitted on Friday for the disease caused by the coronavirus.