Boris Johnson has said doctors prepared to announce his death as he battled coronavirus in intensive care.
The Prime Minister said: “It was a tough old moment, I won’t deny it. They had a strategy to deal with a ‘death of Stalin’-type scenario.”
He told the Sun On Sunday: “I was not in particularly brilliant shape and I was aware there were contingency plans in place.
“The doctors had all sorts of arrangements for what to do if things went badly wrong.
“They gave me a face mask so I got litres and litres of oxygen and for a long time I had that and the little nose jobbie.”
‘It was hard to believe that in just a few days my health had deteriorated to this extent.’
Boris Johnson
Johnson said: “The bloody indicators kept going in the wrong direction” and that he kept asking himself: ‘How am I going to get out of this?'”
He said: “It was hard to believe that in just a few days my health had deteriorated to this extent.
“I remember feeling frustrated. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better.
“But the bad moment came when it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to put a tube down my windpipe.
“That was when it got a bit . . . they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally.”
He said he was “in denial” initially about how serious his illness was, and said doctors were right to “force” him to go to St Thomas’s where he spent three nights in intensive care.
Johnson, 55, was admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital on April 5 with “persistent” coronavirus symptoms ten days after he was first diagnosed.
He then spent days in intensive care battling the virus before finally being discharged from hospital.
Johnson and his fiancee Carrie Symonds announced the birth of their baby boy just 17 days after he got home following his battle with Covid-19.
The newborn has the middle name Nicholas – in recognition of doctors Nicholas Price and Nicholas Hart, who saved the PM’s life in intensive care.
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