Joe Biden tested positive again for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 on Saturday, the White House doctor said in a statement. The US president, who is 79, had tested negative in the previous four days.
The American president is feeling very well and has no symptoms of the disease, said the White House doctor on Saturday.
Joe Biden, who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 for the first time nine days ago, with mild Covid symptoms, will have to return to solitary confinement and the White House has announced the cancellation of his planned trips for the next few days in Delaware and Michigan. “I have no symptoms but will self-isolate for the safety of everyone around me. I am still at work and will be back on the road soon,” the White House chief said on his Twitter account. .
Folks, today I tested positive for COVID again.
This happens with a small minority of folks.
I’ve got no symptoms but I am going to isolate for the safety of everyone around me.
I’m still at work, and will be back on the road soon.
— President Biden (@POTUS) July 30, 2022
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The White House said he would remain in solitary confinement until his tests came back negative. Kevin O’Connor, the White House doctor, assumes that this positive test is in some way a “rebound” of positivity that some Covid patients may experience when they have been treated, like Joe Biden, with the help of the antiviral Paxlovid. The US president, who is 79, had tested negative in the previous four days. His doctor does not plan to put him on treatment again, given his lack of symptoms.
A possible relapse 2 to 8 days after a negative test
The rebound of positivity is rare even if a controversy agitated the medical world in the United States last spring.
So the Vidal.fr indicates that doctors had reported that “some immunocompetent patients, who had followed a 5-day course of nirmatrelvir, often combined with Paxlovid, and who had recovered, had experienced a relapse 2 to 8 days later, including in vaccinated patients”. “Their viral load, initially negative, has become positive again with the possibility of contamination of contact cases”, details Vidal.
The symptoms of these relapses disappeared spontaneously. “These cases were not reinfections and no other respiratory pathogens have been identified.”
The Pfizer laboratory then revealed that during clinical studies around nirmatrelvir, “several participants had shown viral load rebounds between the 10th and 14th day after the end of treatment, and that this phenomenon had also occurred in some subjects who received the placebo.
At the end of May 2022, the American authorities had published guidance “indicating that a brief return of symptoms may be part of the natural history of SARS-CoV-2 infection in some patients, independent of treatment with nirmatrelvir, adding there is no evidence that further treatment is necessary”.
According to US authorities, “suppression of viral multiplication by nirmatrelvir during treatment may reduce exposure of the immune system to full viral antigens, thereby delaying the acquisition of fully effective immunity. Studies are in progress. course to assess the effects of longer treatment”.
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