Foreign secretary and first secretary of state Dominic Raab has said that prime minister Boris Johnson remains in intensive care but is breathing without the need for a ventilator.
Raab announced the news at the daily government coronavirus briefing, where he once again deputised for Johnson.
Raab hailed the prime minister as a “fighter”, expressing his confidence that he would recover from his symptoms.
According to the Telegraph’s in-depth report on the prime minister’s hospitalisation, it is likely the prime minister’s symptoms grew more severe due to his insistence on continuing to work.
When the prime minister first disclosed that he had contracted coronavirus on in a Twitter video posted on March 27, his symptoms appeared mild.
Seven days later, however, when Johnson made his last on-screen Twitter appearance, it was clear his condition had deteriorated.
In that latter video appearance, Johnson insisted that he was “feeling better” but still had “one symptom”, which he called “a temperature”. Given that two days later he had been moved to St. Thomas’ Hospital and spent Monday night in intensive care where he remains up to the time of writing, it does suggest that the prime minister had played down the severity of his condition.
The report goes on to describe how Johnson continued to chair Cobra meetings remotely, despite the fact he was suffering from his symptoms throughout.
A source from Whitehall is quoted as saying: "In the meetings and conference calls when he was in isolation, there were a few times where he was coughing, he sounded under the weather.
"You hear some really awful accounts of people who can't talk or draw breath, but he definitely didn’t sound in that category.”
Even on the very day Johnson first developed symptoms, March 26, a day before his diagnosis, he was out on the doors of Downing Street to join the national applauding of the NHS.
The following day, after his personal Twitter video to the nation revealing that he tested positive, he telephoned US president Donald Trump to negotiate a deal on ventilators.
Johnson was self-isolating in his flat in Number 11 Downing Street, while his pregnant partner Carrie Symonds relocated to their south London home. Johnson was also using the ground floor study, typically reserved for the chancellor, to work in. Meals were brought to the study door and left outside for him to claim.
Over the weekend of March 28 and March 29, Johnson proceeded to write a letter to be delivered to every UK household which urged British citizens to remain indoors. Last Tuesday, he then chaired the first ever digitally exclusive cabinet meeting, with senior minsiters and health advisers dialling in.
On April 2, Mr Johnson was out on the steps of Number 11, again applauding the NHS, in the last snippet of video footage where the prime minister was seen outdoors.
Last weekend, Johnson tasked himself with making contact with Sir Keir Starmer after his appointment as the new Labour leader, with whom he discussed the prospect of working together against the pandemic.
All of this escalated to the point where his condition deteriorated on Monday, culminating in his admittance to hospital and then to an intensive care unit.
At Monday’s coronavirus meeting just hours beforehand, Raab had admitted that Johnson was continuing to run the government despite his illness.
The prime minister’s determination to continue his work, although admirable, may well have hampered his recovery.
