Doctors discharged Trump from the hospital last week after he tested negative for COVID-19. The president himself said he does not think he is contagious. "When you catch it, you get better, and then you are immune", the president said.
"If he means that he's been infected and having been infected and recovered, that he will not get infected again — that's true for a limited period of time. What we do not know is how long that protection lasts. So technically speaking, the fact that he has recovered from an immunological standpoint, he has an immune response in him — that very likely would protect him from being reinfected", Fauci told CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Monday.
However, Fauci, who is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that he would still wear a mask to be extra careful.
"They have found that if you are 10 days from the onset of symptoms, the chances are extraordinarily low that you are going to be transmissible — that you would be able to transmit it. If you really want to nail it down, you do a PCR test and you show that the person has a level of virus that's not going to be transmitted. And that's what you can do sometimes. Whether they do that or not that remains to be seen", Fauci said.
The infectious disease expert pointed out that there have been cases of people getting reinfected with the coronavirus. "So you really have to be careful that you do not completely quote 'immune'", Fauci told CNN.
White House Physician Dr Sean Conley said in a Monday statement that Trump had tested negative for the coronavirus.
"In response to your inquiry regarding the President's most recent COVID-19 tests, I can share with you that he has tested NEGATIVE, on consecutive days, using the Abbott BinaxNOW antigen card", Conley said in a Monday statement to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Conley added that apart from this particular test, Trump has also undergone antigen tests and other procedures that all indicate a lack of detectable viral replication, which means that Trump is not infectious to others.
Meanwhile researchers have reported what appears to be the first death from a reinfection with the coronavirus. According to findings published in the Oxford University Press, the patient was an 89-year-old Dutch woman suffering from a type of white blood cell cancer.
