1 hr 30 min agoPresident Trump is receiving several different treatments for Covid-19
"It is not over 'til it's over"
One doctor, fwiw, said he thought Trump looked as though he had a moderate dose of it. It wasn't a doctor treating him.
Whatever, Trump probably has a better chance of getting through catching the virus than any other victim in the world.
From CNN's Jacqueline Howard and Lauren Mascarenhas
President Donald Trump leaves the White House for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 2. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
President Donald Trump's physicians are giving him several different treatments — including investigational drugs — in the hope of relieving his Covid-19 symptoms and possibly shortening his course of illness.
While many questions remain about the President's condition and when he was first diagnosed with the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, here is what has been revealed so far about what he was been treated with — and when.
Regeneron's monoclonal antibody therapy: On Friday afternoon, the White House said in a letter that Trump was treated with an 8-gram dose of the experimental antibody therapy cocktail made by the biotechnology company Regeneron. The investigational cocktail, known by its investigational name REGN-COV2 .. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-covid-19-updates-saturday/h_572663cbb8d11ac73cf2fe1aba6f72d9 , has been in clinical trials since June.
Dexamethasone: Trump was given the corticosteroid drug dexamethasone on Saturday after his oxygen level transiently dipped, White House physician Dr. Sean Conley said during a briefing on Sunday. The drug is typically given to patients on supplemental oxygen or needing ventilation.
The metaphors that Trump and others use when talking about COVID-19 are making the pandemic worse.
Ed Yong October 10, 2020
Getty / Shutterstock / The Atlantic
On Monday, as President Donald Trump left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia tweeted a doctored clip .. https://twitter.com/kloeffler/status/1313201217309417478 .. of the president tackling and punching the wrestler and WWE CEO Vince McMahon. In the edited version, McMahon’s face has been replaced with a picture of a virus. “COVID stood NO chance against @realDonaldTrump! .. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump ” Loeffler wrote.
Such rhetoric is not unique to Trump. In the Western world, bouts of illness are regularly described as “battles.” Viruses and other pathogens are “enemies” to be “beaten.” Patients are encouraged to “be strong” and praised for being “fighters.” “It’s so embedded in our nature to give encouragement in that way,” says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University, “but it’s language that we try not to use in health care.”
Equating disease with warfare .. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/war-metaphor-coronavirus/609049/ , and recovery with strength, means that death and disability are linked to failure and weakness. That “does such a disservice to all of the families who have lost loved ones, or who are facing long-term consequences,” says Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University. Like so much else about the pandemic, the strength-centered rhetoric confuses more than it clarifies, and reveals more about America’s values than the disease currently plaguing it.
These overreactions also explain some intriguing connections between a person’s mental and physical health. In several experiments .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7345443/ , Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University, who studies the connections between the nervous and immune systems, has found that volunteers who suffer from chronic stress—especially unemployment or long-running personal conflicts—are more likely to fall sick after inhaling small doses of common-cold or influenza viruses. That’s not because, as Cohen initially assumed, stressed people are more likely to take up unhealthy habits, but because stress makes their immune system more likely to overreact.
Cohen also found that people who are more emotionally positive .. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12883117/ .. are less likely to get sick from respiratory viruses. This fits with some other evidence .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439612/ .. (and a widespread belief) that optimists are more likely to recover from disease. But that connection is easy to misinterpret. It’s less that patients with viral diseases can will themselves better by putting on a happy face, and more that positivity reflects prior advantage. Optimists are more likely to have stronger social ties and adhere to medical advice. They’re less likely to have suffered the chronic stress that Cohen has linked to a higher infection risk. “I believe there are [psychological] factors that might extend your well-being,” says Choo, “but at the bedside, what I can tell you is that no one wants to die. Everyone is fighting to live with everything they have.”
A pandemic can tear away emotional resources that can help in that fight. “One of the things that’s so difficult about this virus is the fear and loneliness that accompanies it,” Ranney says. “People can’t have their normal support systems. They can’t have friends and family at their bedside. I look like an alien in full personal protective equipment, and I can’t do any of the things that would enhance a patient’s resilience, like hold their hands.”
As Susan Sontag wrote in 1978 .. http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/illnessAsMetaphor.shtml , it is difficult to enter “the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.” Metaphors work by drawing connections between the familiar and the unfamiliar. This is useful when thinking about diseases, where unseen entities damage our bodies in largely unseen ways. By casting viruses as opponents, the immune system as defenders, and the course of illness as a fight, “we create a representation where we have control,” says Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University.
Metaphors have downsides, though. In studying metaphors for cancer .. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10926488.2019.1611723 , Semino has seen patients blaming themselves for the spread of their tumors—casting themselves as failures for not winning their battles. And when we use “strength” to describe muscles, immune systems, personality, morality, and political power, meaning hops from one sense to another.
This connection between physicality and righteousness created, as its dark corollary, a link between disability and moral failing. That explains why presidents like Woodrow Wilson .. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/woodrow-wilson-stroke .. and Franklin D. Roosevelt .. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-fdr-hid-his-paralysis-from-american-public-even-while-campaigning-2019-4 .. tried to cover up their disabilities, on the misguided notion that “someone with a disability can’t be a good decision maker,” says Wool. It explains, she adds, why “we take it for granted that every villain in every classic story will be physically marked in some way,” including Captain Hook, Darth Vader, multiple Bond villains, and Scar from The Lion King (who, for extra measure, is also coded as queer).
American society has long portrayed strength “as the opposite of disability and feminization,” Wool says. “Those go together, and are seen to be incapacitating. This is relevant in the case of Donald Trump.”
But the leaky nature of metaphor allows displays of strength to be mistaken for its presence. “Strongman characterizations seem to revolve around the dispositional, temperamental features of a leader,” says Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University, “but I think there’s some magical thinking about the physical resilience of such a person too.” Even when Trump himself fell sick, he and his supporters couched his experience in the language of strength, victory, and courage. “Don’t let it dominate you,” he said in a video.
This strength-centered rhetoric is damaging for three reasons. First,it’s a terrible public-health message. It dissuades people from distancing themselves from others and wearing a mask, and equates those measures with weakness and cowardice .. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/10/donald-trump-mike-pence-coronavirus-dangerous-mask-trap/616670/ . “The more you personify the virus, the more one version of heroism is to ignore it,” says Semino. “When people take that idea to extremes, they say, I’m strong. I’m not going to be cowed by this.”
Third, “metaphors redirect our attention,” says Wool, the medical anthropologist, and create “dead zones” in our thinking. “The idea of fighting a disease creates this dyad between you and the illness” and distracts us from everything that affects that fight. Trump was born into wealth. He is white. He is the president of the United States. He had regular access to COVID-19 tests. He was given supplemental oxygen at the White House—his home—before being airlifted to Walter Reed, where he received dedicated medical care on taxpayer funds that he himself contributed nothing to in 10 of the past 15 years .. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html . When he apparently felt lonely, he left the hospital in a motorcade so he could wave to his supporters, exposing the Secret Service agents riding alongside him. He received three treatments—remdesivir, dexamethasone, and an experimental antibody cocktail from the biotechnology company Regeneron, whose CEO .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/investing/trump-regeneron/index.html .. is an acquaintance of Trump’s and a member of one of his golf courses.
“He received a level of care that no patient has received in this country, and a combination of medications that has probably never been given to another patient,” Blackstock, the emergency physician, says. “He’ll probably end up doing well because of his access to resources.”
By contrast, many Americans have struggled to get tested for COVID-19 throughout the year—a problem that still dominates the lives of long-haulers who lack the diagnostic certainty needed for benefit claims or participation in research. Nearly 30 million Americans lacked health insurance last year, and that number has undoubtedly risen further amid record unemployment. Because of the combined burden of historical and everyday racism .. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/01/14/577664626/making-the-case-that-discrimination-is-bad-for-your-health , many people of color must cope with chronic stress—the same stress that Cohen, the Carnegie Mellon researcher, showed makes them vulnerable to respiratory viruses in general. Many worked “essential jobs,” risking infections in unprotected workplaces and crowded public transport to make hourly wages that they couldn’t afford to lose. Acknowledging none of this, a defiant Trump told the country, “Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines.”
Trump is hardly the first American to mischaracterize his own privilege as fortitude,but from his lips, that error is uniquely and doubly pernicious. It distracts not only from the massive advantages that he enjoys, but also from his singular role in America’s pandemic year .. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/ . The horrors that others have endured are in large part the result of his ineptitude, and the same empty strength that he now claims has defeated the disease. Trump is both beneficiary and engine of the unequal, broken systems that have led to the deaths of more than 210,000 Americans, but have thus far averted his own. In the time since his diagnosis, more than 300,000 other people in the U.S. have tested positive. More than 4,000 have died. Their fates were not a matter of weakness, but their numbers should make the self-described most powerful nation in the world consider how strong it truly is.
Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.
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