New York Times
President Trump has been given the steroid dexamethasone, his physician said on Sunday.
President Trump’s medical team acknowledged delivering an overly rosy description of the president’s illness on Saturday.
“I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction, and in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true,” Dr. Sean P. Conley, the White House physician, said in a briefing with reporters Sunday.
The doctors said that Mr. Trump had a “high fever” on Friday, and that there had been two incidents when his oxygen levels dropped — one on Friday and one on Saturday. They said Mr. Trump received oxygen at the White House on Friday; they were not clear about whether it was administered again on Saturday.
Mr. Trump’s oxygen levels dropped to 93 percent at one point, they said; that is below the 95 percent level that is considered the lower limit of the normal range.
Dr. Conley said that the president had been given the steroid dexamethasone on Saturday. The drug has been shown to help patients who are severely ill with Covid-19, but it is typically not used in mild or moderate cases of the disease, and in fact could be harmful early in the course of the illness, when steroids could dampen the body’s immune response to the virus.
The World Health Organization issued guidelines on Sept. 2 recommending that the steroid only be given to patients with “severe and critical Covid-19.” The National Institutes of Health has issued similar guidance, specifying that the drug is recommended only for people who require a mechanical ventilator to help them breathe, or who need supplemental oxygen. The N.I.H. panel that issued the guidance went further, explicitly recommending against using steroids in patients who did not require supplemental oxygen.
A large study of dexamethasone in Britain found that the drug helped those who had been sick for more than a week, reducing deaths by one-third among patients on mechanical ventilators and by one-fifth among patients receiving supplemental oxygen by other means.
Dexamethasone is one of several treatments that the president has been receiving. On Friday, he was given an infusion of an experimental antibody cocktail that is being tested by the drug maker 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 and remdesivir are treatments that are believed to work best early in the course of the infection, because they fight the virus itself and could prevent it from spreading throughout the body. But dexamethasone, which reduces the body’s immune response, is given later in the illness, when some people’s immune systems go into overdrive and attack their vital organs.
Even though he has had low-oxygen episodes and is receiving dexamethasone, the doctors said Mr. Trump was doing better and might be discharged from the hospital and return to the White House as early as Monday.
The briefing came a day after a messy and contradictory presentation on Friday about whether Mr. Trump had serious medical issues.
— Maggie Haberman and Katie Thomas
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