The husband of Minnesota senator and former 2020 candidate Amy Klobuchar has been hospitalized due to complications related to the coronavirus.
Klobuchar, in a Medium post on Monday, said her husband, law professor John Bessler, received a positive test result for the virus, which has killed thousands worldwide and is keeping millions of Americans indoors and away from work and school.
“John started to feel sick when I was in Minnesota and he was in Washington D.C. and like so many others who have had the disease, he thought it was just a cold. Yet he immediately quarantined himself just in case and stopped going to his job teaching in Baltimore,” Klobuchar wrote. “He kept having a temperature and a bad, bad cough and when he started coughing up blood he got a test and a chest X-ray and they checked him into a hospital in Virginia because of a variety of things including very low oxygen levels which haven’t really improved.”
Klobuchar, 59, added that her husband, 52, was not on a ventilator. But he is receiving oxygen. Klobuchar said she would not get tested because the two have been “in different places for the last two weeks.”
“I hope he will be home soon. I know so many Americans are going through this and so much worse right now. So I hope and pray for you, just as I hope you will do for my husband. Meanwhile I am working in the Senate to get help to the American people,” she added, referencing the ongoing negotiations in Congress over a stimulus bill to help mitigate the economic downfall caused by the pandemic.
According to estimates released Monday, more than 32,000 people in the United States have tested positive for coronavirus, although health experts believe the true number of cases is far higher. At least 400 have died from the illness in the U.S.
Bessler is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He and Klobuchar married in 1993, five years before she won the district attorney role in Hennepin County, Minnesota’s largest jurisdiction. They have one daughter, Abigail Klobuchar Bessler, who graduated from Yale University and works as a legislative director for a member of the New York City Council.
Klobuchar was elected to the Senate in 2006 and sought the 2020 Democratic nomination, dropping out on March 2, the day before Super Tuesday, when she endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden.
