Sen. Amy Klobuchar and her husband recounted the battle with coronavirus that landed him in the hospital on oxygen — and forced her to stay away while he battled the illness.
“I’m on my own, and I’ve got to just keep calling and understand that the people in the hospital are doing the best they can,” Kobuchar told “NBC Nightly News” on Tuesday in an interview from her Minnesota home with her now-recovered law professor husband, John Bessler, at her side.
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“It’s one of the hardest, hardest things, and I can’t even imagine those families where they hear the opposite news, you know, after he’s there for five days and it turns for the best. There are people where it turns for the worse, and they’re on ventilators, or they don’t make it, and it’s a heartbreaking thing, and it’s why we have to invest in testing and do everything to make up for the mistakes that were made at the beginning, where a country was not prepared for this,” Klobuchar told Lester Holt.
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Bessler said he started feeling sick on the morning of March 12.
“I taught three classes the day before and felt great, and it just suddenly hit me and I had a fever, and that fever just lasted for days and days,” Bessler said.
Klobuchar was in Washington to work on the coronavirus stimulus package, and stayed in a different location while Bessler, who teaches at the University of Baltimore, quarantined himself.
Klobuchar said she phoned him every few hours to monitor his temperature.
The senator and former Democratic presidential candidate did not get tested for possibly infection. Klobuchar said in a statement after he was released from the hospital that she and her husband had been in “different places for the last two weeks” and it was “outside the 14-day period for getting sick.”
