David Lat Awaits Discharge From Hospital After Life-Threatening Coronavirus Treatment

David Lat, founder of the AbovetheLaw legal blog, realizes his lucky escape from the severe coronavirus infection and his ability to donate blood for research into the virus.

Just under two weeks ago he was receiving oxygen and afraid for the worse, being rendered unconscious and incubated before receiving the ventilation that saved his life.

“I don’t know that I’m getting any worse,” he said by cellphone in an interview with the New York Law Journal.

He also received experimental drugs to assist in the battle, as well as offering blood to assist scientists to find a successful treatment to the coronavirus.

“I ended up receiving an IL-6 inhibitor called Kevzara, a combo of the antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic called azithromycin, an IL-6 inhibitor called Tocilizumab, an IL-6 inhibitor called Clazakizumab, and an antiviral called Remdesivir,” he said.

The NY Law Journal reports that Lat was transferred out of intensive care on March 29, not long after being taken off a ventilator. And on Tuesday, in his first media interview since he’d returned to stable condition, he talked gratefully about being ready to finally go home—most likely, he said, on Wednesday evening.

He also tried to reflect—for perhaps the first time, he said—on what he had just gone through in his battle with a coronavirus-caused infection that had ravaged his life.

“I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head—and heart—around the enormity of what I’ve just been through,” he said during an extensive interview conducted via direct messaging on Twitter.

“It’s wild to think about how close I came to dying, to leaving my husband Zach to raise our two-year-old son as a single dad . . ”
David Lat

He wrote that “maybe 1.7 times” the doctors and nurses had saved him—a specific calculation that he laid out in a Twitter thread that bore the directness that his tweets have become known for.

“It’s wild to think about how close I came to dying, to leaving my husband Zach to raise our two-year-old son as a single dad,” he said. “I guess my main emotion is gratitude. I’m so thankful for all the people, many of whom I’ve never met, who were praying for, thinking of, and otherwise pulling for me throughout this ordeal. … And I’m so grateful to be alive.”

According to medical staff at NYU, Lat is close to being discharged despite being in a weakened position.

“My heart rate still tends to spike over 100 even for something as simple as walking 15 feet to the bathroom,” he added. “But that’s to be expected given what I’ve been through over the past three weeks.”

He said he had some pain, discussing his situaiton with his 86,000 Twitter followers, which included a retweet over the president’s latest nominee to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

There’s no keeping a top legal tweeter down – even when recovering from the coronavirus.