President in isolation after positive test for virus in ‘rebound’ case
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 again Saturday, slightly more than three days after he was cleared to exit coronavirus isolation, the White House said, in a rare case of “rebound” following treatment with an antiviral drug.
White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor said in a letter that Biden
“has experienced no reemergence of symptoms, and continues to feel quite well.” O’Connor said “there is no reason to reinitiate treatment at this time.”
In accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, Biden will reenter isolation for at least five days. He will isolate at the White House until he tests negative. The agency says most rebound cases remain mild and that severe disease during that period has not been reported.
Just as when Biden first tested positive, the White House sought to show he was still working. The president sent out a photo of himself masked and tieless on Twitter, which showed him signing a declaration that added individual assistance for flood survivors in Kentucky.
The president followed up by tweeting out a 12-second video of him on a White House balcony with his dog, Commander.
Word of Biden’s positive test came just two hours after the White House announced a presidential visit to Michigan this coming Tuesday to highlight the passage of a bill to promote domestic high-tech manufacturing. The trip has been canceled as Biden has returned to isolation.
Biden, 79, was treated with the antiviral drug Paxlovid after he first tested positive July 21. He tested negative for the virus Tuesday and Wednesday. He was then cleared to leave isolation while wearing a mask indoors. His positive tests puts him among the minority of those prescribed the drug to experience a rebound case of the virus.
NKorea pandemic:
North Korea on Saturday reported no new fever cases for the first time since it abruptly admitted to its first domestic COVID-19 outbreak and placed its 26 million people under more draconian restrictions in May.
There have been widespread outside doubts about the accuracy of North Korean statistics as its reported fatalities are too low and its daily fever cases have been plummeting too fast recently. Some experts say North Korea has likely manipulated the scale of illness and deaths to help leader Kim Jong Un maintain absolute control amid mounting economic difficulties.
The North’s anti-epidemic center said via state media it had found zero fever patients in the latest 24 hours, maintaining the country’s total caseload of about 4.8 million. Its death count remains at 74, with a mortality rate of 0.0016% — the world’s lowest, if true.
U.K. blood scandal: The head of an inquiry into a tainted-blood scandal that killed 2,400 people in Britain urged the government to pay survivors and bereaved partners at least $120,000 each in compensation immediately.
Thousands of hemophiliacs
and other hospital patients were infected with HIV or Hepatitis C during the 1970s and ’80s through tainted blood products, largely imported from the United States. The situation has been called the worst treatment disaster in the history of Britain’s health care system.
The contaminated blood was linked to supplies of a clotting agent called Factor VIII, which British health services bought from the U.S. Some of the plasma used to make the blood products was traced to high-risk donors, including prison inmates, who were paid to give blood samples.
U.K. leadership race:
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss cemented her place as front-runner in the race to replace Prime Minister Boris Johnson, winning endorsement Saturday from an influential former rival for the top job.
Tom Tugendhat, who was eliminated from the contest in earlier rounds of voting by Conservative lawmakers,
said Truss had the “resolution, determination, and passion” to be prime minister.
The endorsement is a blow to ex-Treasury chief Rishi Sunak, the other finalist in the race for the next Conservative leader. The winner will be decided by votes from about 180,000 party members across the country.
Polls give Truss an edge with Tory members, though Sunak is more popular with the general public, who don’t have a say in the race. The winner will be announced Sept. 5 and will automatically become prime minister, replacing Johnson, who stepped down as Conservative leader this month after three years in office following months of ethics scandals.
Italy killing: Police in Italy arrested an Italian man in the slaying of a Nigerian vendor whose brutal beating death on a busy beach town thoroughfare was filmed by onlookers without any apparent attempt to intervene
physically.
Video footage of the attack has circulated widely on Italian news websites and social media, eliciting outrage as Italy enters a parliamentary election campaign in which the right-wing coalition has already made immigration an issue.
“The murder of Alika Ogorchukwu is dismaying,’’ Enrico Letta, a former premier and the head of the left-wing Democratic Party, wrote Saturday on Twitter, naming the vendor who died Friday. “Unheard of ferocity. Widespread indifference. There can be no justification.”
Right-wing leader Matteo Salvini, who is making security a plank of his campaign, also expressed outrage over the death, saying “security has no color and ... needs to return to being a right.”
Ogorchukwu, 39, was selling goods Friday on the main street of Civitanova Marche, a beach town on the Adriatic Sea, when his attacker grabbed the vendor’s crutch and struck him down, according to police.
Egypt frees 7: Egypt released seven people Saturday, including a journalist and a researcher serving prison sentences on terror-related charges, the latest steps by the government to reach out to the opposition amid a grinding economic crisis.
Saturday’s freeing of journalist Hisham Fouad and anthropology researcher Ahmed Samir came a day after President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi pardoned them, along with five others, according to state-run media.
Fouad was arrested along with several other secular activists in June 2019, shortly after the group met with political parties and opposition lawmakers.
Samir, who is doing his master’s in anthropology at the Vienna-based Central European University, was detained in February 2021 on charges of disseminating false news.
Egypt is eager to improve its image abroad as it prepares to host the next U.N. climate change summit in November.