Chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci said on Saturday that President Joe Biden’s health “continues to improve” after he tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this week.
“The president continues to improve. He’s putting in a full day of work virtually, and as each day goes by he’s doing fine,” Fauci told “CBS Saturday Morning.”
He continued: “And so as we’ve said before, given the fact that he’s been vaccinated, doubly boosted and is receiving Paxlovid, a drug that clearly goes a long way to preventing progression of disease, we fully expect that he’s going to be doing very well.”
White House physician Kevin O’Connor confirmed that Biden has a normal pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation, according to CBS.
Responding to concerns about Biden occasionally appearing without a mask since he tested positive for COVID Thursday morning, Fauci said, “When you see him without a mask then he’s following the CDC recommendations.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that those who have tested positive for COVID-19 should isolate for five days and wear a mask if they must be around others at home, and that they should continue to wear masks around others for 10 days after symptoms start or, if they are asymptomatic, after diagnosis.
Fauci also discussed the state of the virus in the U.S., saying that “we’re going to have to learn to live with it.”
“You know, I believe ultimately we’re not going to eliminate or eradicate this virus, we’re going to have to live with it, because it’s the virus that has such a degree of transmissibility that it’s not going to just disappear,” he said.
However, Fauci said that “it’s premature to think we don’t have a problem to deal with” while 40,000 people are in the hospital and hundreds of thousands of people continue to be infected.
“So although we’d all like to be free of the virus, we’re not free of it yet,” he said. “We’re going to have to learn to live with it, but we’ve got to do better than we’re doing right now.”
