eco friendly solutions to combat threats to our planet on al-jazeera. one sam is a dad with our continuing breaking news coverage it's just past the 4 in the morning in washington d.c. where the u.s. president of trump and 1st lady melania are in quarantine inside the white house after testing positive for covert 19 well the couple got tested after a top aide contracted the virus hope picks have traveled with a couple on tuesday to go to the presidential debate in cleveland ohio and the next day they flew together to a campaign rally in the soter well this is how president confirmed he tested

positive he did it in a tweet by saying flotus and i tested positive for covert 19 we will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately we will get through this together our white house while the top white house doctor rather is released a memo spot speaking about the president and 1st lady saying they are both well at this time and that they will remain at the white house during their convalescence it goes on to say the president will continue carrying out his duties while recovering we've also heard from the 1st lady herself also tweeted to say she and president trump are in quarantine at home along a trump says they're both feeling good and all her upcoming engagements have been postponed she also encouraged everyone to stay safe. our white house correspondent kimberly halkett joins us now from washington d.c.

and kimberly the eyes and ears of the world will be watching out for any update on the state of health of the u.s. president what is the procedure when are we likely to get an update on that. well the white house press office typically on a normal day would start to roll in about 7 am but i expect that the lights did not go off last night in terms of somebody in that press office they are rapidly trying to come up with a crisis communication plan of how things are going to look moving forward this president was already struggling in terms of his reelection effort lagging behind in the polls largely being criticized by ordinary americans for his handling of the virus and demick in the united states the fact that he openly mocked his rival joe biden the democratic presidential nominee on the debate stage on tuesday mocking the fact that he has. really been holding his campaigning events almost virtually for the most part wearing

a mask almost all the time the president is certainly going to have to eat those words given the fact that he has now tested positive the other concern in all of this is how many people have been exposed as a result of coming in close contact with the president who has not let up on his very public campaign schedule he had really counted on least final weeks to try and close the gap in terms of those poll numbers it's hard to see how he's going to be able to do that now this presents an enormous challenge for his reelection effort having said that he could garner some sympathy votes and if he does contract or rather becomes gravely ill as a result of this lend does happen to survive or bounce back it could also inject new life into the campaign that has been struggling but what's clear is that this campaign no longer looks like how any american expected that it would and notable

silence that is occurring right now is from joe biden's campaign well they had all kinds of statements from the white house who we haven't heard from is joe biden's campaign that's a little bit. and usual because these are 24 hour operations at this point even though it's the middle of the night here in washington and on the east coast of the united states where joe biden is presumably and in wilmington delaware where his home is. usually there would try to be some sort of reassurance even some political advantage that could be gained and that has not happened it's very quiet so as americans wake up in the morning and learn the news of the president and the 1st lady testing positive for cocaine 90 the next question is going to be what about joe biden and the reason that he is so much risk isn't just because he's 78 years old but also because he was standing on a stage shouting at very loudly again with donald trump even though they were more than 6 feet apart the fact that there could have been some of those

aerosol type droplets as the 2 men yelled and shouted back and forth does put joe biden at risk it also puts at risk all of his aides over the president's aides there has been so much campaign that has taken place and well there has been this effort to try and take every precaution we know that sometimes even that is not enough so there are going to be reverberations that are going to be felt in the coming hours that americans have simply not seen before we're in uncharted territory at this point and kimberly doing a note how many policymakers some of the key policy makers may have been in close contact with the president and may now be facing the prospect of not being able to function normally. the numbers are really hard to pin down but what we do know is that in terms of exposure to ho pics there have been some very high profile americans and within the president's administration that have come in very close

proximity just in the preparation of the presidential debate that took place on tuesday we know that hope was in the same room as the chief of staff with the vice president the president according to the reporting that i've seen and some of the sections that we've seen and also the 1st lady was posing for photos that night with some of the president's immediate family members including a vodka trump including kimberly guilfoyle who is an advisor to the president so that the number of people that have had contact with the president or contact with someone who had contact with the president is enormous we're not talking dozens we're talking hundreds and so this is going to have a big impact on the number of people that are going to have to go into self isolation in order to ensure that this doesn't continue to spread in terms of the infection. and this puts the focus back on covert 19

which is a negative ride for the president as he heads towards an election this is not good news. absolutely this is a president who was trying to continue a campaign schedule much like he had in 2016 multiple campaign stops visiting battleground states this was a president that was scheduled to travel for make america great again rally and friday night in sanford florida that has been canceled that's up he have it all battleground state the president needs to win in order to win reelection and saturday he was scheduled to go to wisconsin other battleground state that he narrowly won in 2016 and needs it again and the polls don't seem to support that him winning at this point so he needed that rally and now it is impossible for the president to continue to go at least physically whether or not that wisconsin rally will still take place and the president appears virtually it's unclear it will

depend it i suppose on the president's help with each day that will be closely monitored but already we know that in terms of continuity of government there are going to have to be an enormous number of officials but starting with the vice president and the house speaker nancy pelosi who are going to have to sell ice like as precautions to protect themselves from becoming ill so that there can be this assurance of the american public that the u.s. government can continue and of course our national security standpoint there needs to be that part projection globally all right stay with us kimberly. let's talk a little bit about his feeling towards masks and we mentioned the exchange between trump and joe biden during the presidential debate in cleveland ohio on tuesday when trump was asked about the use of mass to help prevent coronavirus and this is what he had to say i mean i have a masquerade here i've put a mask on and you know when i think i need it tonight is an example everybody has had a test and you've had social distancing and all of the things that you have to but

i was there mistakes when needed when needed i were a mess ok i don't have i don't where mass like him every time you see him he's got a mask it be speaking 200 feet away from him he shows up with the biggest mask ever seen. go back to kimberley how could our white house correspondent can be listening into those comments there and knowing how politically divisive the issue of masks has been in the u.s. one imagines that this is going to add fuel to the fire of those who say look we told you this president was not responsible when it comes to his handling of the covert 19 crisis. yes and that's where this president is struggling so much with polls right now even those that didn't like donald trump previously before the pandemic may have been inclined to vote for him because the economy was doing so well but all of that has been wiped out and the president is under enormous pressure given the fact that there have been criticisms about his handling of kobe

bryant t. that he has not done enough soon enough the fact of the president was openly in the presidential debate mocking his rival joe biden for what he does and the success of mask wearing is going to be something is going to come back and bite him his critics are going to say i told you so and his supporters have going to 2nd guess the judgment of the u.s. president and also what this does for the president in terms of the fact that he is test positive is that it completely obliterates his ability to say to the american public things are getting better things are returning to normal that is certainly what his message was and what he was trying to project by holding these rallies but unfortunately it has come back to bite him as we say in the united states the fact that he he's tried and failed is not going to bode well for his reelection chances already plummeting in the polls by at least 8 percent according to the numbers that

we've seen most recently we'll have to watch carefully to see what this news does in terms of the president's reelection chances now but clearly what we know from the white house is that for the forseeable future the president and the 1st lady as a result of their positive coverage $900.00 tests are now in quarantine for at least 40 days which is the standard number of days to actually but also those that have come in contact with him as well senior aides there will working with the president directly even some members of the president's family will also not have to i self isolate continue to test in order to ensure that this hasn't gone further than than just the president the 1st lady. all right thanks so much can really help get there take a closer look at the president's health now trump is 74 years old and considered overweight both make him high risk for coronavirus concerns were raised about his

condition in june when he appeared to have difficulty drinking water and coming down from the stage at an event he tweeted that the ramp was steep and very slippery dismissing speculation about his health in november last year trump made non scheduled visit to the doctor for tests something that's usually noted in his public diary the white house said he was in good health during his campaign in 2016 trump produced a note saying he'd be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency a doctor later said trump had written the letter him self son gyre. is an associate professor of infectious diseases at the australian national university joins us by skype from camera good to have you with us so 1st of all with everything that we know about donald trump's health given that information how would one expect covert 19 to impact

a person. right so look he could potentially despite a couple of respected have a very mild illness and hopefully that will be the case and he will get over it we're angry cover without any major complications but 2 things against against that his age and potential obesity as well we know that if someone is around $74.00 which which is he $74.00 so if you're over 70 the mortality rate of the death rate from this infection now it varies in studies around the world but it's around 10 percent and if someone is a beast there's about a 100 percent increased risk of being hospitalized compared to someone who isn't about a 70 percent chance of having out a critically ill illness and about a 48 percent chance of dying or right now how long might it

take before one would know if this virus you know if we're going to have you are going to suffer from this virus or it's going to be a mild case i mean how soon would one be able to make that determination sure normally you know this is quite different to start often early on people got on well with curve it it's usually early on in the 2nd week that people start to become unwell so the 1st few days and beyond this might be mild you know maybe that 2nd week that they start to become unwell and in fact when asked if a 48 percent chance of another obese person dying i mean a relative not absolute but she qualified. and from the information that's coming came out so far that i'm sure you've been following do we know if he has symptoms at this point and how severe they are. mara look i'm as much of that dark as

you are about that so i'm not sure if he was simply a test because a close contact of his tested positive i understand what i hear in the press that he has regular tests so if that is the case that could be helpful so we might know whether earlier it week it was negative or not and that might also help contact traces trying to work 'd out who close contacts would be but i said the death rate is much higher in people over 70 say about 10 percent it also means that 90 percent of people in that age groups of life so it's it's not at all not so glum. is there anything that you when you look at this case is quite a public one obviously and don trump has been quite open about his approach to masts and other safety measures do you look at this and say well there is a lesson to be drawn here if not. a judgment to be drawn here about how

well the president and his team were observing basic safety measures the doctors have been calling for or around the world who are i don't want to talk about a specific individual case while someone is sick but certainly we do know that in areas of high community transmission we have physical distance can't be safely maintained that masks allow a significant reduction in transmission of infection and that even without mass physical distance same good hand hygiene and keeping away from others when you get when you're sick and getting tested early or help fight the transmission of this it . does this situation say anything about the effectiveness of some of the drugs which the president was endorsing hydroxy chloroquine and i think he was saying in may that he was taking it on a daily basis. yeah there's certainly no evidence for medications like

chloroquine as a term i assume in fighting cove it there is a medication called brain death of beer which may have an impact on mortality we're not quite sure yet but it seems to. increase the time to recovery but really those medications that you mentioned do not have a role in managing codes it and from what we know about the president's schedule in the last 2448 hours he you know he's he's had a busy schedule he's appeared at campaign rallies it wasn't long ago he was at that debating cleveland ohio would you suspect somebody with that kind of active schedule may have passed this on to many other people or many other people may have received it from wherever he got it from as well that this is not going to be just an isolated case that's right look at it also depends on a few things was he symptomatic or asymptomatic if he was coughing and spluttering

he may be inclined to have expected more people than if he was asymptomatic so that it's important as well but context traces will try and determine what or how many close contacts the hat so how many people he was in almost face to face contact for 15 minutes or so or was in the same room for more than 2 hours so those sorts of things context races are going to go through in great detail to try to determine the number of close contacts that the president has had all right thanks so much for your thoughts on that thank you. you know watching al jazeera our continuing coverage on breaking news continues u.s. president donald trump has tested positive for covert 19 after his senior advisor hope aches contracted the virus 1st lady milan year has also tested positive both had attended a fund raising event in new jersey on thursday afternoon

a top white house doctor says both will quarantine the white house the president will continue his duties while recovering robert gucci is an associate professor at lancaster university in the u.k. joins us on skype from there good to have you with us so this is a potentially well it is an unchartered and potentially quite disruptive development not only for the u.s. for the u.s. is role in the world right. yeah. it's surprising that donald trump hasn't come out a little bit more clearly and said we prepared for this here are the ways that i'll be moving over executive power if i need to at a particular point even certainly those things must be. must have been taking place inside the white house but i think he's also not wanting to give out you know the power of the sense of power the optics that he has and that he's going to just somehow continue to stay in control which is partially what we saw to be getting

worse johnson. falling down with the illness here before he did have to move some of those powers around a bit now we've this also comes at a very sensitive time for the u.s. president's reelection campaign a campaign which has been focused on rallies rather than sort of online virtual appearances that assumably is going to have to completely change now. well i don't think we should give up on donald trump's supporters vigor wanting to gather i think you know a lot of those supporters are going to say well remember it's not that we've denied that coat it exists we've denied that it's anything worse than the winter flu and so unless we see donald trump on ventilators unless we see him in a hospital bed which i don't know that he would ever allow us to actually see i think a lot of these folks are so going to gather together they're still going to balk at

wearing masks and they're going to say look this is the flu we should not deny that this is something that's going i'm going to be hard to turn those those diehards around but look this is the worst thing that could have happened for both candidates is now talking about hope it is unleashing so many uncertainties about policies that might be looking forward for the next 4 years that people were hoping for the economy health schools hospitals lots of things that both candidates really wanted to avoid and of course you focus a lot on sociology and sociologically speaking how does this mean i know you said that this is going to put the focus on a lot of issues which neither candidate really want to focus on but is it more damaging to the american psyche for the u.s. president because he was the president of hey this is going to go away like a miracle and the economy was doing great. yeah this was the president can't happen

here. and you know he's but he's put bunkers around you know where he goes and he hides in his bunkers when it went there's things going on in protests he's put up fences all the way around the white house to protect himself against protesters he's distanced himself socially from anybody who disagrees with him he's taken lots of steps along the way to protect himself not just from coakley but from criticism about coded in his other policies this is really a moment where it says the president is fallible and that's going to be hard for him to come back because donald trump always likes to take a stand that says he's infallible but there's are already starting some conversations that this was being blamed on secret service for not maintaining their own health and well being and so the scapegoats are already coming through the veil and donald trump may just escape if you can find the right scapegoat to say look this isn't my fault this was you know i don't i'm not in charge of the

daily work of the secret service for instance so it's about pushing off the blame at this point for him to come back and that leads me to my next point was going to ask you is this going to feed that sold of vicious self victimization narrative and divisiveness in american politics or do you think this is going to be a pause where people actually reach out to each other. well i think unfortunately we've seen on social media so much misunderstood information that the movement of conspiracy theories you know maybe maybe this was done so that the vice president looks more presidential for his debate next week i mean lots of you know maybe this was a forced they maybe this is a hoax. that's unfortunately going to be a part of what's coming through social media i don't think it's going to be a moment where people come together in going to churches or pray for their president i don't think that this is the presidency where that's going to happen but i do think that doctrines going to say look you know this wasn't my fault this

was somebody else's fault and i'm going to fire them make sure that we get a better firewall here and i'm going to try and certainly come through this it has he says he's going to do this with his wife but we also see that the optics between him and his wife haven't always been the best so there are lots of layers here where people can either dive in with great criticism and critique or they can you know build greater divides or they can come together i think what they're going to do is is use this to build more divides between each other and that's certainly what's been happening for the last 4 years or it's been good to get your analysis on that i saw a lot of a bitch i think you know the prime minister of india is also reacting on twitter saying wishing my friend donald trump and the 1st lady of the labia a quick quick covering and good health the director general of the world health organization has been tweeting saying my best wishes to president donald trump and

1st lady milan here for a full and speedy recovery. also heard from the president of the european council let's go to dominic cain is in berlin so what kind of reaction are we getting from european latest to this. well the the present the european council in brussels where the e.u. summit is taking place which explains why all the e.u. leaders are there to well he has gone taken to twitter to say that he wishes real donald trump which is the president's twitter handle and flotus the 1st lady a speedy recovery code 19 he says is a battle we all continue to fight every day no matter where we live we've also heard from other european leaders the polish president. tweeting our good wishes for a speedy recovery to off friends poland and the united states will get through the hardships and succeed in fighting coded 19 and finally not an easy you head of government but the british prime minister barak's johnson who viewers will recall

himself suffered from the corona virus was indeed taken to intensive care so bad was his infection with the virus but of course he recovered mr johnson who said he sends his best wishes to president trump and the 1st lady he hopes they both have a speedy recovery from corona virus that is political reaction from around the european union and beyond in the case of the u.k. the 1st reactions as it were the economic they were from the stock markets across the the european continent the 3 most important perhaps being the footsie 100 in london the cac in paris and the dax in frankfurt and all of them opened and the price and values fell somewhere around one percent on opening but then the fluctuation of those shares means that it's a little bit lower it's higher rather so less than one percent in so far as shares

and the reaction on the markets is concerned. we will very likely be hearing from many more european leaders during the course of the day because that summit is going on in brussels $27.00 heads of government or heads of states taking part in the summit and that means that very many of them will be holding news conferences when the summit comes to an end and of course all the enterprising journalists correspondents reporters in brussels will be trying to get a reaction from the relevant heads of government and heads of states the interesting thing is from the german perspective at least obviously angela merkel is in brussels but other ministers who might have taken to twitter well they have not done so the last time i checked in the last minute or so have not expressed any reaction so far at least and remember of course from the european perspective the way they perceive president trump well that's all tied up with the way that he has perceived the e.u. and nato because of the importance that nato has in guaranteeing the security of

this continent leaders here will remember the bridge the anger that the president trying has taken and has expressed at the way that european governments notably the german government have in his view failed to provide enough money for their part in nato and he has always felt it was always expressed his feeling that they haven't done enough so far at least forget the nato side of things for the moment many leaders have not yet expressed their opinion about what just happened to president trump although as i say they are all in brussels and they are very likely to be posed questions about what they see as being the situation regarding president trump of his wife and what effect that might have not just on the white house not on the retina and the race for the white house but the wider geo political position here in europe given the importance that the united states has here. thanks so much dominic kane there. asian markets are also being

affected by the news about president trump brive joins us live from seoul now so markets don't usually like instability or uncertainty and i guess this is no exception right. absolutely the markets don't like uncertainty and there is nothing to cause greater uncertainty than of course the leader of the free world being confirmed as having coded 19 this came as a real shock around lunchtime early afternoon friday local time here in east asia the nikkei index in tokyo immediately fell by one percent also the stock market in australia falling by one percent as well the economy minister in japan and yes or tashi an issue more confirming the fallout from this news the impact on the markets and hoping that from as far as the japanese government is concerned mr trump makes a speedy recovery and it has to be said that no other parts of east asia they

happen to be on holiday at the moment so the markets in china have been closed also in south korea and in taiwan but we have been getting responses from these countries in east asia from the taiwanese there has been a message you're sending best wishes to the white house moon jay ins office the president presidential office of south korea they say that despite the holiday that is under way here they are closely monitoring the situation from china as well because of the holiday there it's been left to the official media to give the initial responses and interestingly from the china daily this is the english language official newspaper there has been a slightly caustic response a saying that this shows the covert 19 continues to spread despite president trump's insistence to the contrary of course that china and the united.