Britain’s Johnson released from hospital after Covid-19 treatment
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been discharged from hospital after being treated for Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, a government spokesman said.
The news came shortly before the governments of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales said that the number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain had surpassed 10,000.
“In that past seven days I have of course seen the pressure that the NHS is under,” Johnson said in a video message posted to his Twitter account shortly after he left St. Thomas’ Hospital in central London.
“I have seen the personal courage, not just of the doctors and nurses, but of everyone – the cleaners, the cooks, the health care workers of every description,” he said. “The NHS is the beating heart of this country, it is unconquerable, it is powered by love.”
The 55-year-old conservative politician was hospitalized a week ago running a high fever and spent three days in the intensive care unit.
Johnson will not immediately take up his duties as prime minister as per his doctors’ advice and will spend the rest of his recovery period at Chequers, the prime minister’s residence outside London, the government spokesman said.
In a statement late on Saturday, Johnson said of the health workers who took care of him: “I owe them my life.”
British news agency PA cited government sources saying Johnson had spent his time in hospital watching films, reading letters from members of the public and looking at ultrasound images from his pregnant fiancee Carrie Symonds.
Foreign Minister Dominic Raab is deputizing for Johnson, but there are no clearly defined rules for situations in which a British head of government is not able to fulfil his or her duties.
Britain has recorded nearly 79,000 cases of Covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus. Some 10,000 have died as the country’s National Health Service struggles to treat the large influx of patients.
According to the Wellcome Trust, Britain could be “one of the worst, if not the worst affected country in Europe,” with its director Jeremy Farrar telling the BBC that government experts were expecting a second and third wave of infections.
Farrar said that though a vaccine could be available by autumn, it would take longer to ramp up manufacturing to the scale required to vaccinate many millions of people.
Read also: Freed Cardinal Pell writes of evil and suffering in Easter message
British news agency PA cited NHS England as saying that a further 657 people had died in hospitals in England in the past 24 hours, bringing the total death toll there to 9,594.
Public Health Wales said 18 further deaths had been reported, taking the number of deaths in Wales to 369. In Scotland, the new overall toll stood at 566, while Northern Ireland reported a new total of 118. That takes Britain’s overall death toll to 10,647.
