Coronavirus: Specialist hospital suite that looks more like a fine hotel

The six-room presidential suite has a kitchen, a dining room, a working area and a desk and is decorated like a fine hotel.

The presidential suite at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center contains an intensive care unit and room for a head of state to live and work alongside his own physician and his chief of staff.

The present occupant, who moved in on Friday evening, appears to have no complaints about the facilities. “I think it’s the finest in the world,” President Trump said in a video message posted to his Twitter account on Saturday night, in which he appeared to be seated at the end of a conference table.

Many of us in #AZ05 are praying for President @realDonaldTrump as he battles COVID-19. He’s looking and sounding very good tonight.

Get well soon, Mr. President! https://t.co/gYGK6ivWEC

— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) October 4, 2020

While the hospital is run by the Department of Defence, the presidential suite on the south side of the complex is under the control of the White House and features a secure conference room and related communications facilities.

Specialists assigned to treat the president undergo security screenings and checks and hospital administrators cannot roam freely down its corridors.

The six-room suite has a kitchen, a dining room, a working area and a desk, according to NBC. Though it has the pale walls and ceilings of a hospital ward, the living areas are decorated more in the manner of a fine hotel. There’s a spacious living room with heavy leather chairs, mahogany furniture and a grandfather clock, and a dining room with a chandelier.

U.S president Trump isn’t staying in any old hospital room. Walter Reed Hospital has a six-room presidential suite just for the commander in chief that includes an intensive care unit, a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, & a dining room with a crystal chandelier. pic.twitter.com/QQVhFYjzLJ

— Richard Southern (@richard680news) October 3, 2020

Walter Reed is considered the pre-eminent military hospital in the country and has a proud history as the first destination for wounded servicemen and women brought home from foreign fields.

The hospital is named after one of its founders, Major Walter Reed, who discovered that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. He and a colleague, Major William Borden, had been campaigning for a new military hospital. He died in 1902, and the hospital bearing his name opened in 1909.

Wounded soldiers from the Second World War and campaigns in Korea and Vietnam were treated there and so were presidents. Dwight Eisenhower was said to have signed the bill establishing interstate highways while having treatment there in 1956, and would later spend the last months of his life there.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland. Picture: AFP.

Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, Richard Nixon suffered an infection and was treated at the hospital. Lyndon B Johnson, John F Kennedy’s running mate, is said to have visited the hospital to find the vice-president in his pyjamas.

In 2011 Walter Reed was combined with a naval hospital founded by President Franklin Roosevelt on farm fields near Bethesda in Maryland. He was said to have chosen the site because the name reminded him of the New Testament story of the pool of Bethesda, where Jesus heals a paralysed man – resisting pressure to place the hospital nearer the centre of Washington DC. He offered a suggestion for its design, based on the state capitol building in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Both hospitals were closed in 2005 and reopened as Walter Reed National Military Center in 2011.

Mr Trump has been there before for check-ups. In 2019 an unscheduled visit, not acknowledged for several days, prompted questions over his health. A White House spokeswoman later said that he had taken advantage of a free weekend to have part of his routine physical examination.

The president visited military patients there in July – the first time he had been seen wearing a mask in public.

Last night some of his followers gathered outside and the president addressed them in his usual manner, over Twitter. “I really appreciate all of the fans and supporters outside of the hospital,” he wrote. “The fact is, they really love our Country.”

THE TIMES