Donald Trump checked in at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 2, 2020, and it's possible he was more ill than people thought. The then president had low blood oxygen levels and had signs of lung disease. He was immediately started on an aggressive course of treatments, which included an IV of remdesivir.
These two years have made a difference. While isolating at the White House, Joe Biden has been carrying out his presidential duties after testing positive for Covid. Biden said in the video that he was doing well and would continue to get it done.
Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who has worked on vaccine development, says that the treatment for COVID in Trump versus Biden is different. It may be obvious to all, but it bears repeating that the most striking difference is the fact that Trump was exposed to the virus before the vaccine was available. After a trip to Walter Reed by helicopter, Trump was given a steroid and a high-dose injection of a monoclonal antibody cocktail.
Biden only received an oral antiviral pill and he was fully vaccine and boosted. Iwasaki says that the benefit of the COVID vaccines is shown in this example.
The goal of the vaccines is demonstrated by the different courses of the illness of these two men. Edy Kim is a critical care physician at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. There has been a decline in patients moving into the intensive care unit and a reduction in patients hospitalized with COVID. He says that the vaccine's purpose is not to avoid COVID entirely, but to help you avoid hospitalization.
The scientists and health care workers who have witnessed these before and after times marvel at the current protection. According to Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, people in Biden's and Trump's age group are doing better than they were before vaccinations. And how much you get matters. Four shots are better than three and three are better than two according to him.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that, for healthy adults age 50 and older, a second booster prevented hospitalizations caused by the Omicron variant and its subvariants. Peter Hotez says that the fact that President Biden is sitting up and dressed despite his diagnosis is not an accident.
Hotez credits Biden's illness to his two booster shots against COVID and his early treatment with Paxlovid. Trump received an experimental medicine that was not widely available when he was president. Biden is being treated with a drug that can be obtained at a pharmacy. His illness reminds everyone to take full advantage of vaccinations and treatments, which are not happening in a lot of parts of the country.
Paxlovid is one of the widely available antiviral treatments. Today the average of daily new COVID cases is around 126,000, which is three times what they were when Trump was first diagnosed. The number of deaths per day is half of what it was. Hanage says that's a huge difference. A lot of that is due to the advances that we have made over the last few years.
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