The president had immediate access to first-class treatment as well as doctors who have honed their understanding of the disease over several months of the pandemic.
When Chanon DiCarlo’s husband and three children fell ill with the coronavirus, she nursed them herself at their home in Chicago, shuttling between upstairs bedrooms and the basement where they were kept in careful quarantine. Sometimes she administered Tylenol for pain. On the rare day they saw a doctor, it was via Zoom. “You didn’t get to have somebody check out your lungs, you didn’t get to have an X-ray,” said Ms. DiCarlo,46, who works in the concert industry. “No doctor got to check my children’s heart rate or breathing.” As a buoyant President Trump emerged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center this week, appeared on a balcony at the White House, and proclaimed on Twitter that the public should have no fear of the coronavirus, many Americans saw few parallels between Mr. Trump’s experience with the virus and their own. Ms. DiCarlo thought back to her struggles obtaining tests early in the pandemic, when few were available anywhere in the country. A woman in Brooklyn was reminded of the $4,000 she was charged for medication for her father, who eventually died from the coronavirus. One man in Texas said he understood why the president of the United States would have top-flight doctors, but could not help comparing the place where Mr. Trump was treated with the facility where his 87-year-old mother became sick. “He’s got the best care in the world,” said Samuel Roy Quinn, whose mother died at a nursing home in April. “I’m not sure that my mom got the best care in the world at that facility she was staying at.” Some Covid-19 survivors, even those who support Mr. Trump, found what they consider his lack of compassion off-putting. Dale Grizzle, a retired house painter in Rydal, Ga., said he understood the intention of the president’s “don’t panic” message but did not care for the way he said it. Mr. Grizzle,70, recalls the horror of feeling that he was going to die during his own hospital stay with the coronavirus. “If I had been him, I probably wouldn’t have said, ‘Don’t be scared of the virus,’” Mr. Grizzle said. “I probably would have said, ‘Man, this stuff can be really rough on certain people.’ I would have said, ‘Even people my age really have a problem with it under certain conditions.
