President Donald Trump heads to Marine One outside the White House en route to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday night.Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s former Chief of StaffMark Meadowshas revealed that the former president’s blood oxygen levels were “dangerously low” while he wasinfected with COVID-19last year.
In the bookThe Chief’s Chief, which was released Tuesday, Meadows writes that the president was put on oxygen in his residence at the White House hours after Trump announced Oct. 2 that he had tested positive for the virus,The New York Times reports.
“Although the president’s condition had improved slightly overnight, his oxygen levels had now dipped down to about 86 percent and could be trending lower, a dangerously low level for someone his age,” Meadows writes, according to the report, which states that levels of about 95 to 98 percent are normal for healthy people.
Meadows — who also tells in the book ofTrump’s positive COVID test resultdays before a presidential debate with Joe Biden — wrote that the White House medical team asked him for help in getting the president to the hospital.
“I worried that the notion of him going to the hospital, in his mind, would seem like an act of capitulation,” Meadows wrote, according to theTimes. “I was right.”
Donald Trump’s doctors at Walter Reed hospital.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Although Trump was initially reluctant to leave the White House, Meadows convinced the president toseek treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “It’s better that you walk out of here today under your own strength, your own power, than for me to have to carry you out on a gurney in two days,” Meadows said he told him.
Heading to the helicopter that would take him to the hospital, Meadows writes that Trump was so weak that dropped a briefcase he’d planned to carry.
“I’ve lost so much strength,” Trump said, according to Meadows. “The muscles are just not responding.”
TheTimesalso reports that Meadows writes in the book of arranging a secret delivery ofRegeneron’s antibody cocktail therapyfor the president.
“We’d rigged the four-poster bed in the president’s room so that he could recline and take the drug while he was still alert and giving orders,” Meadows writes.
He also said a senior aide obtained “special authorization” to land a small jet carrying doses of Regeneron at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport so they could easily be taken to the White House.
Though Meadows writes that doctors at Walter Reed told him the treatment was working, his oxygen levels remained “dangerously low” and the medical team there was prepared for a “long stay — weeks, maybe longer.”
source: people.com
