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Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has revealed that the British government made contingency plans for his death as his condition deteriorated while battling COVID-19 at the hospital last month.
In an interview with The Sun newspaper on Sunday, Johnson said doctors gave him “gallons and gallons of oxygen” to keep him alive.
Plus:
Johnson, 55, returned to work Monday, a month after testing positive for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus.
He spent 10 days in isolation on Downing Street since the end of March, but was then taken to London’s St Thomas Hospital, where he received oxygen treatment and spent three nights in intensive care.
“They had a strategy to deal with a ‘Stalin death’ type scenario,” Johnson told The Sun. “It was a difficult old time; I will not deny it.”
He added: “He was not in particularly bright shape, and he knew there were contingency plans.”
After Johnson was released, St Thomas said he was pleased to have cared for the prime minister, but the hospital has not released details on the severity of his illness beyond claiming that he was treated in intensive care.
Johnson and his fiance Carrie Symonds announced the name of their newborn son Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas on Saturday, in part as a tribute to two of the intensive care doctors who they said had saved Johnson’s life.
“The doctors had all kinds of arrangements for what to do if things went wrong,” Johnson said of his COVID-19 battle. “The bloody indicators were still going in the wrong direction.”
He said doctors discussed invasive ventilation.
“The bad time came when I was 50-50 if they were going to have to put a tube in my windpipe,” he said.
“It was then that he got a little bit … they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally.”
Johnson described feeling “frustrated” when his health worsened and became emotional when he described the terrible experience, according to The Sun.
She lowered her recovery to “wonderful, wonderful breastfeeding,” adding, “It was something extraordinary.”
The experience made him more determined to fight the disease and return the country to normal, Johnson said, adding that would announce a “road map” to ease the blocking restrictions imposed in late March later this week.
The prime minister’s comments came when the government announced 621 more deaths in the outbreak, bringing the cumulative total to 28,131, just behind Europe’s worst-affected country, Italy.
SOURCE:
Al Jazeera and news agencies
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