TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) \u2014 Honduran President Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez was hospitalized Wednesday with pneumonia, hours after announcing that he and his wife had tested positive for COVID-19.<\/p>\n
Francis Contreras, spokesman for the National System of Risk Management, said in a news conference that after reviewing Hern\u00e1ndez’s lab work and x-rays, doctors determined the president had pneumonia and recommended he be hospitalized. He said Hern\u00e1ndez was in good condition, but he was receiving medicine intraveneously that had to be administered in the Military Hospital.<\/p>\n
Hern\u00e1ndez had announced late Tuesday night in a televized message that he and his wife had tested positive for COVID-19.<\/p>\n
Hern\u00e1ndez said that over the weekend he began feeling some discomfort and on Tuesday received the test results.<\/p>\n
He said it was part of the risk that comes with the job. With his responsibilities, he said, he could not stay at home constantly.<\/p>\n
Hern\u00e1ndez said his symptoms are light and that he\u2019s already starting to feel better. He said he had started what he called the \u201cMAIZ treatment,\u201d an experimental combination of microdacyn, azithromycin, ivermectin and zinc.<\/p>\n
He said his wife is asymptomatic and two other people who work with them are also infected.<\/p>\n
Honduras has nearly 10,000 confirmed cases of the disease and 330 deaths. But testing is limited and the public health system operating under great strain.<\/p>\n
The center of Honduras’ epidemic has been in Cortes, the state surrounding San Pedro Sula in the north, but in recent weeks cases have surged around the capital of Tegucigalpa.<\/p>\n
Hern\u00e1ndez is a close ally of the Trump administration, primarily in efforts to slow illegal immigration. However, U.S. federal prosecutors in New York have prosecuted the president’s brother and made it increasingly clear that a case is building against Hern\u00e1ndez himself.<\/p>\n
No charges have been filed against the president, but U.S. prosecutors have alleged that he accepted money from drug traffickers to advance his political career in exchange for letting them move drugs through the country.<\/p>\n
Hern\u00e1ndez has denied those allegations.<\/p>\n
He was reelected in a disputed November 2017 election, despite the country’s constitutional ban on reelection.<\/p>\n
AP writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) \u2014 Honduran President Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez was hospitalized Wednesday with pneumonia, hours after announcing that he and his wife had tested positive for COVID-19. Francis Contreras, spokesman for the National System of Risk Management, said in a news conference that after reviewing Hern\u00e1ndez’s lab work and x-rays, doctors determined the president had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4561,"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4557\/revisions\/4561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonotarsomoy.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}