Sen. Rand Paul said Monday he is finished with an "extraordinarily mild case" of coronavirus, and insisted he was following doctors' instructions when he continued to work on Capitol Hill for six days after being tested in March.
"I was told by the Louisville health authorities that I didn't need to quarantine," the Kentucky Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "I followed explicitly the doctor's advice to a tee. I was asked not to quarantine or test. I didn't follow that, I went ahead and got tested but I was not asked to quarantine."
During the week after he was tested, the senator attended a luncheon, spoke on the Senate floor, and on the day he announced his diagnosis, had gone went swimming at the Senate gym.
"I think some of these people overreacted and I think that's true of the country," Paul said. "People are scared and frightened, and when people are frightened they don't think about the facts, they just get mad."
Paul said he never had any symptoms of coronavirus, and likely would not have gotten tested 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," said Paul. "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 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."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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