Amy Klobuchar: Not sure how ‘very healthy’ husband John got coronavirus

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota on Tuesday said her husband John Bessler is on oxygen after testing positive for COVID-19, saying that he is “very healthy” and they’re not sure how he contracted the virus.

“Today, he’s still on oxygen,” Ms. Klobuchar, who ended her presidential bid this month, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “The reason he was hospitalized is he had pneumonia; he was coughing up blood and his oxygen levels were dangerously low. So he’s been there for a few days now.”

She said her husband, 52, is “very healthy” and they don’t know how he got it.

On Monday, Ms. Klobuchar said he started to feel sick when she was in Minnesota and he was in Washington, D.C. The senator said he immediately quarantined himself and stopped going to his teaching job in Baltimore.

Ms. Klobuchar said on Tuesday that she has not been tested and is not quarantining because they were apart.

“By the time we got the test back, the 14 days had gone by,” she said, saying she spoke to a doctor and was told she wouldn’t qualify for a test.

“’You don’t have symptoms; you haven’t been around him for 14 days,’” she said. “So why would I get a test when other people who aren’t sick aren’t getting tests? And so that’s how I approached it. I thought, I’m going to be treated like everyone else.”

“As far as we know, he didn’t infect anyone else,” she said.

“No one around us got it. Maybe it was just a random thing, and he started to feel sick about 12 days ago,” she said on Tuesday. “The minute he started to feel like he had a cold he sequestered himself, quarantined himself in the apartment … and that’s where he stayed until he started coughing up the blood.”

Ms. Klobuchar said he was tested last Wednesday and that they didn’t get the results until Monday.

“That’s the story of a lot of people,” she said. “A lot of Americans have this, and worse, going on and one of the hardest things about this disease is you can’t go and visit your loved one.”

“Everyone’s going to know someone in their family where this happens, or their friends,” she said.