Sen. Rand Paul gives first interview since recovering from COVID-19
Republican Sen. Rand Paul volunteers at his local hospital after recovering from coronavirus. Sen. Paul and Dr. Marc Siegel join 'Fox & Friends.'
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In his first interview since recovering from COVID-19, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., described what it was like to contract the new coronavirus.
“I had an extraordinarily mild case,” Paul, who is also a doctor, said on “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “I had no symptoms, never had a headache, never had a body ache, never had a fever, never had a cough.”
He added that he would not have gone to the hospital or the doctor’s office if he didn’t know it was going around and if he hadn’t been traveling so much.
“It's a bizarre sort of situation that some people get very, very sick, even die from this and some people get no symptoms,” Paul said.
“They've tested people in Iceland, where they’ve tested a large body of the population of Iceland and they found that about 50 percent of the people [who] were positive have no symptoms and so there's something about this illness that's not just the illness, but your immune response to it and it may be some sort of genetic thing that some people are genetically predisposed to an overwhelming immune response that ends up making the patient very sick, with their lungs filling up with fluid. And then other people like myself get virtually no symptoms.”
Paul became the first U.S. senator to test positive for the coronavirus three weeks ago and then remained in quarantine, his staff announced last month.
The senator entered into quarantine in Kentucky and was continuing to work, while staffers in Paul’s Washington, D.C., office worked remotely. A spokesman for Paul confirmed that the senator had been at the Senate gym the morning before learning of his diagnosis and leaving for Kentucky; Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas said he saw Paul at the gym and kept a safe distance.
When asked what his message is to the senators who thought he should not have been at the gym Paul said, “I think the facts are important.”
“I was told by the Louisville health authorities that I didn't need to quarantine,” he said. “I followed explicitly the doctor’s advice to a tee.”
“I was asked not to quarantine or test. I didn't follow that [the testing advice] to a tee. I went ahead and got tested, but I was not asked to quarantine,” he continued.
“In fact, I went to a large charity event with 1,000 people there and they told everyone there, unless you had contact with the one who was positive you didn't need to be quarantined. So I think some of these people overreacted and I think that's true of the country. People are scared and frightened and when people are frightened they don't always think about the facts, they just get mad.”
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Last month Paul’s team tweeted: "We want to be clear, Senator Paul left the Senate IMMEDIATELY upon learning of his diagnosis. He had zero contact with anyone & went into quarantine. Insinuations such as those below that he went to the gym after learning of his results are just completely false & irresponsible!"
Since recovering from COVID-19, Paul, who said he has more than 20 years of experience working in medicine, has been volunteering at a local hospital and explained what it has been like.
Paul said his medical experience mostly includes performing eye surgeries, but he also has experience working in the emergency room and spent a year performing general surgery.
“Because I now have immunity I can't catch it presumably,” he said. “I have the ability to go into rooms more often.”
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He added, “anything I can do to prevent a trip of either a doctor or a nurse into the room is helpful to them.”
“I try to be encouraging to the patient just from a moral standpoint,” he went on to say. “Some of the patients I've been with, the biggest thing that bothers them is they can't see family. Their family isn't allowed to visit them in the hospital and that's hard on people, young or old.”
Fox News’ Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.
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