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British Newscaster Kate Garraway Says Husband May Never Fully Recover After Contracting COVID-19

A British TV journalist is opening up about her husband's health after the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has left him in serious condition.

Kate Garraway, one of the anchors for ITV's Good Morning Britain, shared in an interview Friday that her husband Derek Draper no longer has COVID-19, but that the contagious respiratory virus has had a lasting impact on his health.

"He is now COVID-free. So he's testing negative for the COVID virus," she said on GMB. "So the fight with the virus has been won, and he's still here. But, it's wreaked extraordinary damage on his body. And we don't know if he can recover from that."

Garraway, 53, said that Draper has "fought the most extraordinary battle" after first being put in a medically induced coma in April.

"I hate that idea of fighting a battle because it is a battle, but the fact that he's still here and is holding on," Garraway explained. "I hate the idea that other people haven't fought hard enough or something. And I'm just so grateful that he's still here and I've got the option of praying and hoping when others have had that stripped away. But he is very, very sick."

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Garraway gave Draper's illness a technology analogy: "It's a little bit like a computer virus I think, it's like the doctors manage one bit extraordinarily well and there seems to be a flicker of hope and then other things emerge and they're fighting that, and it's affected him from the top of his head to the tip of his toes."

Garraway added that her husband's doctor told her Draper's "incredibly rare" case is "the worst affected person" they had treated to survive. While Draper is no longer in an induced coma, his recovery has been a very slow one.

"Some of the damage he's got, the doctors have told me that he's only one in five people that they've seen it in," Garraway, who shares two children with Draper, said.

The journalist explained that while she is full of hope for her husband's recovery, she is also full of "uncertainty," in part because the doctors are unable to predict the outcome.

Shutterstock Derek Draper, Kate Garraway

"The problem is, is I have huge hope and massive positivity and would never give up on that — because Derek's the core of my life and our lives — but at the same time I have absolute uncertainty," she told her fellow GMB anchors. "And it's not just me, by the way, it's his mum and dad and his sisters and everybody who loves him. All his friends. We're all going through that."

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"And the doctors don't know," she said. "They don't know because they've never seen this before."

"We think of COVID as being something where you either live, mercifully, or it takes you. I think at the beginning of this, that's what it was like," Garraway said, adding that she herself suffered from a mild case. "But now what we're seeing is that there are more and more people who are living, but with completely unforeseen consequences."

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