President Trump’s vital signs were “very concerning” over the last day and he is not out of danger, the White House chief of staff said on Saturday, contradicting a rosier picture painted by the president’s doctors on television just minutes before.
While the doctors maintained that Mr. Trump was “doing very well” and in “exceptionally good spirits” after his first night in the hospital with the coronavirus, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, provided a more sober assessment and warned that the next two days would be pivotal in determining the outcome of the illness.
“The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care,” Mr. Meadows told reporters outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where the president was flown on Friday evening and will remain for at least a few days. “We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”
Mr. Meadow’s remarks were attributed to a person familiar with the president’s health in a pool report sent to White House journalists in keeping with ground rules that he set for the interview. But a video posted online captured Mr. Meadows approaching the pool reporters outside Walter Reed following the doctors’ televised briefing and asking to speak off the record, making clear who the unnamed source was.
The mixed messages only exacerbated the confusion and uncertainties surrounding the president’s situation. During their briefing, the doctors refused to provide important details and gave timelines that conflicted with earlier White House accounts and left the impression that the president had become sick and begun treatment earlier than officially reported.
Two people close to the White House said in separate interviews with The New York Times that the president had trouble breathing on Friday and that his oxygen level had dropped, prompting his doctors to give him supplemental oxygen while at the White House and transfer him to Walter Reed, where he could be monitored with better equipment and treated more rapidly in case of trouble.
During the televised briefing on Saturday, Dr. Sean P. Conley, the White House physician, said the president was not currently receiving supplemental oxygen but repeatedly declined to say definitively whether he had ever been on oxygen. “None at this moment and yesterday with the team, while we were all here, he was not on oxygen,” Dr. Conley said, seeming to suggest that there was a period on Friday at the White House when he was.
Dr. Conley likewise appeared to indicate that the president was first diagnosed with the virus on Wednesday rather than on Thursday night, when Mr. Trump disclosed that he had tested positive on Twitter. While describing what he said was the president’s progress, the doctor said Mr. Trump was “just 72 hours into the diagnosis now,” which would mean it happened midday on Wednesday.
Asked about that, Dr. Conley did not clarify but said that on Thursday afternoon “we repeated testing and, given clinical indications, had a little bit more concern.” Late that night, he said, “we got the PCR confirmation that he was” positive. Mr. Trump attended campaign events on both Wednesday night and Thursday without wearing a mask and while gathering with hundreds of supporters who likewise were not taking precautions against the virus.
Dr. Brian Garibaldi, another physician treating the president, also said that Mr. Trump had received an experimental antibody therapy “about 48 hours ago,” which would have been midday Thursday — before the confirmation test that Dr. Conley said came back positive that evening and a full day before the White House disclosed the treatment on Friday.
The confusion came from a briefing where Dr. Conley and his team offered a relentlessly positive assessment of Mr. Trump’s condition. “This morning the president is doing very well,” Dr. Conley said. “At this time, the team and I are extremely happy with the progress the president has made.”
The doctors said Mr. Trump had been free of fever for 24 hours and had blood pressure and heart rates that were normal for him. Asked why he moved Mr. Trump to the hospital, Dr. Conley said, “Because he’s the president of the United States.”
Dr. Sean N. Dooley, another physician on the team, said Mr. Trump was feeling optimistic. “He’s in exceptionally good spirits,” Dr. Dooley said. He added that the president had told his doctors, “I feel like I could walk out of here today.”
Mr. Trump amplified that buoyant tone in a Twitter message on Saturday afternoon. “Doctors, Nurses and ALL at the GREAT Walter Reed Medical Center, and others from likewise incredible institutions who have joined them, are AMAZING!!!” he wrote. “Tremendous progress has been made over the last 6 months in fighting this PLAGUE. With their help, I am feeling well!”
While the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, said during a televised briefing on Saturday that President Trump was “doing very well,” a person close to the situation said on the condition of anonymity that the president’s vital signs were concerning and that he was not out of danger.
Here are views from other leading doctors. The doctors have not treated the president and were speaking based only on the reported information about his condition.
Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston: “This is a nightmare. When we first learned about this disease, it was the patients who fit the president’s description who we were most worried about. ”
Dr. Carlos del Rio, distinguished professor of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta: “Transferring him to Walter Reed was the right thing. Because any of us who have seen patients with Covid, especially patients at his age, can say that one minute they seem fine and the next minute not. It’s not terribly surprising. This is the critical time. This is the first 48-72 hours. The fact that they’re giving him remdesevir and everything else, it’s the right thing to do. Because of his age, he is at high risk and, if I was his doctor, I would be concerned.”
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician at Columbia University Medical Center in New York: On the public comment from Trump’s medical team, Dr. Spencer said, “All of that is reassuring, and so it’s hard to correlate that with what is being mentioned from the anonymous source.” Regarding the discrepancy between the formal report and the anonymous source, he said: “Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. The problem is that we should know, we should have a better idea of what the actual status is of the president. We need more of a scientific update, as opposed to a political one.”
A White House long in denial confronted reality this week after President Trump and the first lady both tested positive for the virus, along with a cadre of close advisers, including Hope Hicks, a top White House aide, and Bill Stepien, the Trump campaign manager.
The outcome appeared shocking but also inevitable in a West Wing that assumed that rapid virus tests for everyone who entered each morning were substitutes for other safety measures, like social distancing and wearing masks.
But the outcome was also a byproduct, former aides said, of the recklessness and top-down culture of fear that Mr. Trump created at the White House and throughout his administration. If you wanted to make the boss happy, they said, you left the mask at home.
President Trump at times told staff wearing masks in meetings to “get that thing off,” an administration official said. Everyone knew that Mr. Trump viewed masks as a sign of weakness, officials said, and that his message was clear. “You were looked down upon when you would walk by with a mask,” said Olivia Troye, a top aide on the coronavirus task force who resigned in August and has endorsed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In public, some of the president’s favorite targets were mask-wearing White House correspondents. “Would you take it off, I can hardly hear you,” Mr. Trump told Jeff Mason of Reuters in May, then mocked Mr. Mason for wanting “to be politically correct” when he refused.
An event to celebrate President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, has become the object of intense curiosity after at least eight attendees, including the president and the first lady, tested positive for the coronavirus.
The ceremony, held last Saturday in the White House Rose Garden, was attended by multiple Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as many high-ranking White House advisers and aides.
Two senators who attended the event have tested positive. Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, both of whom announced their test results on Friday, are among several people who have tested positive since attending the events last Saturday. Mr. Lee was recorded hugging several attendees with a mask in his hand just five days before he tested positive. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, attended the event and in the following days helped Mr. Trump prepare for his Tuesday presidential debate. He also has the virus.
Kellyanne Conway, a former White House counselor, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame, and Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, also tested positive after attending.
The Sept. 26 ceremony does not appear to be a “super-spreader” event, in which a single infected person transmits the virus to many others, because most attendees have tested negative in recent days. Mr. Trump’s actual announcement took place outdoors. Indoor discussions were also held before and after the event inside the White House, where guests were more likely to spread the virus.
The president mingled with attendees in a reception in the Diplomatic Room, where few people, if any, were wearing masks, and met with Judge Barrett in the Oval Office.
But with Mr. Trump hospitalized, and multiple attendees showing symptoms, speculation has mounted about whether the event seeded the virus inside one of the most exclusive Republican gatherings.
In small, poorly ventilated rooms, a single infected person talking and mingling with others can potentially infect dozens of people, especially if they are unmasked. Such a “super spreader” event is highly unlikely to have occurred outdoors in the Rose Garden, but an infected person without symptoms could still have transmitted the virus to others during discussions inside the White House by talking loudly and breathing around them.
Hope Hicks, a White House adviser who also tested positive this week, was not at the event. She traveled with the president several times during the week.
Public health experts have cautioned that, because of the coronavirus’s incubation period, people who have been infected may not show symptoms or test positive for several days after exposure, adding to concern that more attendees may be infected.
The N.F.L. postponed a highly anticipated game scheduled for Sunday between the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs until Monday or Tuesday after positive coronavirus tests on both teams. According to multiple reports, Cam Newton, the Patriots quarterback, was among those who tested positive.
The Patriots confirmed a positive test, but did not identify the player. In a statement released Saturday, the team said the player entered isolation and that subsequent testing done on players and staff who had been in contact with him had come back negative.
The new positive tests come after the N.F.L. spent much of the week scrambling to address an outbreak of positive tests among the Tennessee Titans. That team reported 11 positive tests among players and team personnel, which forced the league to push its scheduled Week 4 game against the Pittsburgh Steelers back to Oct. 25, Week 7 of the football calendar.
In a statement, the league said that the Patriots and the Chiefs were consulting with infectious disease experts and “working closely with the N.F.L. and the N.F.L.P.A. to evaluate multiple close contacts, perform additional testing and monitor developments.”
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who for several days this week helped the president prepare for the debate, said he has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Mr. Christie announced his condition on Saturday, becoming the latest of several Trump associates to say they had tested positive for the virus.
“I want to thank all of my friends and colleagues who have reached out to ask how I was feeling in the last day or two,” he said on Twitter.
Mr. Christie’s statement came one day after Bill Stepien, President Trump’s campaign manager, tested positive for the virus.
Mr. Stepien, who was with Mr. Trump at the presidential debate in Cleveland on Tuesday, is experiencing mild symptoms and is in isolation, according to a person briefed on the matter.
Mr. Christie and Mr. Stepien were among several advisers who huddled with Mr. Trump and others for debate preparation from Sunday to Tuesday.
That group also included Hope Hicks, one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers, and Kellyanne Conway, the former senior White House aide, both of whom have since tested positive.
No one wore masks during the preparation, Mr. Christie said.
Ms. Conway and Mr. Christie also attended a White House event on Sept. 26 announcing Mr. Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Others who attended and said they have tested positive include Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah; Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina; and the Rev. John I. Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame.
There are those in Wisconsin who have begun to think of their state as a bit of a twofer when it comes to hot spots.
In recent weeks, the coronavirus has spiked in counties throughout the state. Then there is the matter of the presidential campaign and the seemingly unblinking attention that has been focused on Wisconsin voters lately.
On Saturday morning, the office of Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, announced that he tested positive for the coronavirus. It was not clear where Mr. Johnson contracted the virus but his office said he was exposed earlier this week to an individual who tested positive.
Wisconsin residents have watched with growing alarm as virus cases have exploded. Three of the four metro areas in the United States with the most cases per capita were in northeastern Wisconsin, and one hospital in Green Bay was nearly full this week.
“It’s just crazy here now,” said Steve VanderLoop, 64.
Several of his co-workers at a manufacturing plant, Mr. VanderLoop heard, have fallen ill from Covid-19. So did his brother-in-law’s entire family in nearby Washington County and a good friend up the shore of Lake Winnebago. Then the gut punch: His 96-year-old mother learned that she had the virus.
As Mr. VanderLoop spoke, he was standing on his porch, a cloth mask covering his face. Along the block, yards and fences were festooned with Biden signs, billowing Trump flags, hand-painted posters and bumper stickers with peace symbols.
“Then you throw in the campaign and everything else,” he said. “It’s a big snowball.”
Daily statewide virus deaths hit a record on Wednesday, when officials reported 26 fatalities. On Thursday, hospitalizations were at a high since the pandemic began, and more than 3,000 new cases were reported, another record.
With little more than a month to go before the election, the constant whirl of political activity in this pivotal swing state has intensified.
President Trump visited in August, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned there in September. The two candidates have focused on the state, which both parties see as winnable.
President Trump’s bombshell announcement early Friday morning that he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus has set off a frenzy in the White House and beyond as politicians and operatives who have interacted with Mr. Trump in recent days have raced to get their own tests and, in some cases, report the results.
Here is a quick look at the people in Mr. Trump’s orbit and beyond who have spoken publicly on Thursday and Friday about their health and the virus, taken from official statements, announcements made on social media, and spokespeople.
It can take several days after exposure for the virus to reach levels that are detectable by a test. People show symptoms on average around five days after exposure, but as late as 14 days.
Who has tested positive:
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Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee
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Hope Hicks, one of Mr. Trump’s most senior advisers
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Bill Stepien, President Trump’s campaign manager
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Kellyanne Conway, the former top White House adviser, who attended Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination ceremony at the White House on Sept. 26
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Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who met with Judge Barrett on Tuesday
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Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who participated in a debate against his Democratic challenger on Thursday
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Rev. John I. Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame, who also attended the ceremony for Judge Barrett last week
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Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, he did not attend Judge Barrett’s ceremony last week
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Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey
Who has tested negative:
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Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state
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Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary
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William P. Barr, the attorney general
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Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff
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Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff
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Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser
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Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter
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Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s son
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Barron Trump, Mr. Trump’s son
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Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s son
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Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife
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Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee
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Betsy DeVos, the education secretary
More than 100,000 people in India have died from the coronavirus, the government said on Saturday, even as officials plan to lift more restrictions in hopes of reviving the crippled economy.
India’s health ministry reported 1,069 new Covid-19 deaths, bringing the official total to 100,842, though experts say the true toll is probably much higher. Until Saturday, only the United States and Brazil had reported more than 100,000 deaths from the virus.
At 6.4 million, India’s official caseload is the second-highest in the world, surpassed only by the United States, which has more than 7.3 million cases. India’s death and infection rates have climbed in recent months, with September alone accounting for more than 40 percent of its cases and about a third of its deaths.
The numbers have fallen somewhat since mid-September but remain high. And experts suspect that many Covid-19 fatalities in India have gone unreported.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government imposed a harsh nationwide lockdown in March, a move that many experts say was poorly planned, devastating the economy while failing to stop the virus’s spread.
Now, despite the climbing numbers, officials are lifting restrictions in hopes of easing the economic suffering. Cinemas will be allowed to reopen with limited capacity this month, for example, and some states are expected to reopen schools.
In other global developments:
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The Solomon Islands reported its first coronavirus case on Saturday, the local news media reported. The remote South Pacific nation had been one of few countries with no confirmed infections. But Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said in an address to the nation that a student had tested positive after arriving in Honiara, the capital, on a repatriation flight from the Philippines. He said that the student was asymptomatic and that the Health Ministry was tracing his contacts.
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In Afghanistan, the numbers of women reported to have tested positive for the virus and to have died of Covid-19 are far below the numbers reported for men. Globally, men account for 53 percent of confirmed cases and 58 percent of deaths, according to the independent research group Global Health 50/50. But in Afghanistan, men account for 70 percent of cases and 74 percent of deaths — a discrepancy that experts say is most likely the result of women being shut out of the health care system and the public sphere.
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President Xi Jinping of China on Saturday sent a message to President Trump wishing him and the first lady a speedy recovery. In the message to Mr. Trump, Mr. Xi said that he and his wife, Peng Liyuan, “express sympathy and hope you get better soon,” according to a report in The Global Times, a Chinese news outlet controlled by the ruling Communist Party. The message from the Chinese leader comes as the two men have found themselves increasingly at odds as the coronavirus spread around the world and widened a schism between the two superpowers.
Experts have warned that fall will be a uniquely challenging time for combating the pandemic, yet one of the most essential tools for stemming the spread of the coronavirus still has not been widely deployed in the United States and Europe.
While Western nations vowed repeatedly to develop “world-beating” contact tracing and testing operations at the onset of the pandemic, counting and monitoring people who have been exposed to the virus, and who may expose others, has rarely been effectively implemented.
Beholden to privacy rules, Western officials largely trusted people to hand over names to contact tracers. But that trust was not repaid, in large part because governments neglected services that were crucial to winning people’s cooperation: a fast and accurate testing system, and guarantees that people would be housed, fed and paid while they isolated.
Elected officials presented the system as a critical bridge between lockdown and a vaccine, allowing them to contain small outbreaks without shutting down large parts of society. But construction of that bridge has been rocky, at best.
“Public health leaders fell in love with the idea of contact tracing as an important tactic — and it is — but that’d be like if you’re going into war and were just talking about the tanks,” said Brian Castrucci, president of the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health charity in Maryland.
The West’s public health systems have not matched the success in parts of East Asia where the fear of epidemics became more ingrained after SARS appeared in 2002 and MERS was identified in 2012.
In England, people are neither handing over many contacts — about five, on average — nor following the rules.
“It suggests there is some degree of skepticism in the population to engagement,” said Professor Christophe Fraser of the University of Oxford, an adviser to the British government’s tracing program, referring to the proportion of known cases — a fifth — who handed over no other names.
Nearly 10,000 doctors took part in a strike in Peru this week to demand more support from the government as they respond to one of the world’s worst outbreaks of the coronavirus, a union leader said, the latest in a series of protests by public health workers who have endured months of crises at the country’s underfunded hospitals.
The nationwide strike forced Peru’s second-biggest health care provider, the state-run EsSalud, to suspend consultations and scheduled surgeries on Tuesday and Wednesday, said Dr. Teodoro Quiñones, the secretary general of EsSalud’s doctors’ union.
Included in the doctors’ demands was the distribution of a $200 monthly cash bonus that the government promised front-line medical workers months ago. Dr. Quiñones said most doctors had yet to receive the bonus despite being forced to buy their own face masks while working at hospitals that lacked even the most basic medical supplies.
“Do you know the desperation of tending to patients in these conditions? Without oxygen? Without medicine? To see a patient on a ventilator wake up with a tube in their mouth and not have the medicine to sedate them?” Dr. Quiñones said in a telephone interview.
Despite an early and strict lockdown, Peru has suffered one of the highest per capita Covid-19 death tolls in the world, with about 100 confirmed deaths from the disease for every 100,000 people. The pandemic has exposed the shortcomings of a health care system that has had to turn away patients as demand for beds surged for months, before hospitalizations peaked in mid-August and deaths started to decline.
The strike was just one of several disputes over pay and working conditions between the government and public sector health workers. Another doctors’ group held a two-day strike a month ago, and Dr. Quiñones said different unions might team up to hold a bigger, indefinite strike if the government does not address their concerns.
On Saturday, President Trump met with Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the nominee to the Supreme Court, and others in the Oval Office. On Tuesday, he debated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in an indoor hall, neither with a mask, talking at high volume and often without pause.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump traveled to and from Minnesota on Air Force One along with dozens of others. On Thursday, the president appeared indoors before hundreds of supporters at a golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
On none of these occasions was the president wearing a mask. Often, neither were many in the room or on the airplane with him. All in all, conditions like these are a recipe for so-called superspreader events, in which a single infected person transmits the virus to dozens of others, research has shown.
Experts may never know how the president was infected or whom he may have infected, but the timing raises the possibility that he could have been infected last weekend, scientists said. Most people develop symptoms about five days after being infected with the virus, so exposure over the weekend would fit with reports that the president was showing early symptoms on Wednesday and Thursday.
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