WASHINGTON (AP) — COVID-19 symptoms left President Joe Biden with a deep, raspy voice and persistent cough as he met Friday via videoconference with his top economic team. But the president tried to strike a reassuring tone, declaring at the top, “I feel much better than I sound.”
Biden took off a mask and sipped water from a cup as he opened the meeting to discuss the decline in gas prices in recent weeks. Reporters were allowed into a White House auditorium where advisers were sitting to view a few minutes of the proceedings. When they asked how Biden was feeling, he flashed a thumb’s up.
The president’s doctors said his mild COVID symptoms were improving and he was responding well to treatment, as the White House worked to portray the image of a president still on the job despite his illness. He received his presidential daily security briefing via video call while, separately, Chinese President Xi Jinping wished Biden a “speedy recovery.”
The president completed his first full day of Paxlovid, the antiviral therapy treatment meant to reduce the severity of COVID, and Biden’s primary symptoms were a runny noise, fatigue and a loose cough, O’Connor said. Biden’s voice was also deeper Friday morning.
But O’Connor emphasized that the president — who is fully vaccinated and twice boosted — continued to have a good prognosis.
“There has been nothing in the course of his illness thus far which gives me cause to alter that initial expectation,” he wrote.
Those efforts continued Friday, when the White House released a photo of Biden, masked and tieless, in the Treaty Room of the president’s residence, on the phone with his national security advisers. He was also scheduled to meet remotely with his economic team in a meeting focused on gas prices and then, separately, senior White House advisers to discuss legislative priorities.
It was part of an administration effort to shift the narrative from a health scare to a display of Biden as the personification of the idea that most Americans can get COVID and recover without too much suffering and disruption if they’ve gotten their shots and taken other important steps to protect themselves.
Conveying that sentiment on Day 1 of Biden’s coronavirus experience virus wasn’t always easy, though.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said it’s important for Americans to know they must remain careful about the virus, which continues to kill hundreds of people daily.
“That’s the balance that we have to strike,” Osterholm said. “The president of the United States will do very well. But that may not be true for everyone.”
A White House official confirmed that Vice President Kamala Harris was also in close contact with Biden, and chief of staff Ron Klain said he was too. Klain said the White House wasn’t aware of any positive COVID results linked to the president’s case.
“I wholeheartedly disagree,” Jean-Pierre said of comparison. “We are doing this very differently — very differently — than the last administration.”
Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, said it was good for the White House to send the message that Biden can keep working even after testing positive.
“That shows that it’s business as usual,” Wen said.
Jean-Pierre’s predecessor, Jen Psaki, noted that White House officials have “been preparing for this probably for several months now, given the percentage of people in the country who have tested positive.”
Biden will isolate until he tests negative, the White House said.
Dr. Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute, said that could mean he’s “out of commission from interacting with people for at least eight to 10 days.”