Joe Biden has COVID-19. A contagion that comes at the most inopportune time for the president of the United States, who has been forced to cancel a campaign event which was scheduled for this Wednesday in Las Vegas, while pressure continues to grow from his own party for take a step aside and leave the race towards the White House.

The Democratic president, who had just said in an interview that would retire if a doctor told him he had a problem tested positive on Wednesday while campaigning in the key state of Nevada, although he has only “mild symptoms” and no fever, the White House said.

The news comes at a very delicate moment for Biden, in which pressure has intensified to withdraw his candidacy for the November elections. In recent hours, the influential Democratic legislator Adam Schiff has publicly urged him to “pass the baton.”

Schiff is a close ally of the powerful Nancy Pelosiformer House Speaker, and she herself has been ambiguous in her public comments about whether Biden should remain the nominee. According to ‘CNN’, Pelosi herself has told Biden in a phone call that Polls show he can’t beat Donald Trump and that could end Democrats’ chances of taking back the House of Representatives.

For his part, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumerwould have urged Biden to withdraw from a conversation on Saturday, according to ‘ABC News’, an opinion that would also have been conveyed to him by the leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries.

Rally cancelled in Nevada

Biden was campaigning for a second day in Nevada when he tested positive, just before the speech which he had planned before the annual convention of UnidosUS, an important Latino organization, to secure the support of voters in the Hispanic American community. The first to announce it was precisely its president, Janet Murguía, who went up on stage when the president had already been more than an hour and a half late to explain that he had been infected and did not want to infect anyone.

Minutes later, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed in a statement that Biden, who is vaccinated and has received booster doses against COVID-19, had tested positive and was experiencing “mild symptoms”He also said he planned to return to his residence in Delaware to remain in isolation so as not to infect others, although he will continue to “fully” perform all the duties of the Presidency.

The president’s physician, Kevin O’Connor, offered more details in a White House statement explaining that Biden, 81, presented Runny nose and dry cough, with general malaiseon Wednesday afternoon. As he was not feeling well, he took a test that came back positive and the president then took a first dose of the antiviral drug Paxlovid, although His respiratory rate is normal and he has no fever..

The US president, who had already had COVID in 2022, was thus forced to head to his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware, instead of continuing to campaign in Nevada as planned. Upon arriving at the Las Vegas airport, Biden, who was not wearing a mask, gave one of his hands a thumbs-up as he looked at the journalists waiting for him. Asked how he felt, he replied: “I feel good”.

Willing to retire if diagnosed with a medical problem

Just hours before testing positive, the president had recorded an interview that will be broadcast on Thursday on ‘Univision’. Previously, in an interview published this Wednesday with ‘BET News’, the president said that he would reconsider his decision to continue with his electoral campaign if a doctor diagnosed him with a serious medical problem, opening the door to resignation for the first time to his candidacy.

Pressure for him to abandon his re-election aspirations has grown since debate disaster against Donald Trump at the end of June, of which Biden came out very badly. More than twenty Democratic congressmen have already asked him to step aside, but many more have expressed their doubts about Biden’s age and mental agility to face the tough campaign against Trump, the favorite in all the polls and even more strengthened after the assassination attempt which he suffered last Saturday at a rally.