US President Donald Trump said in a new video released on Saturday that he “wasn’t feeling so well” when he was admitted to a military hospital after contracting Covid-19, but he felt “much better” and hoped to be back soon to complete this re-election campaign.

Trump acknowledged, however, that the “real test” lies ahead, over the coming days.

A top Trump administration official said the next 48 hours will be “critical in terms of his care,” adding, “we’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

Sean Conley, the president’s physician, said in a new statement that Trump continued to do well, remained fever-free, needed no supplemental oxygen, worked in the afternoon and moved about the medial suite without difficulty. “While not yet out of the woods, the team remains cautiously optimistic,” he added.

The president was put on supplemental oxygen on Friday after his oxygen levels dropped, which in part prompted the decision to airlift him to the Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, in the adjoining state of Maryland.

Trump sought to portray his hospitalisation as a courageous decision. “I had no choice because I just didn’t want to stay in the White House,” Trump said in the video. “I was given that alternative. Stay in the White House, lock yourself in, don’t ever leave, do’t even go to the Oval Office. Just stay upstairs and enjoy it. Don’t see people, don’t talk to people and just be done with it.

“I can’t do that, I had to be out front,” he added. “We have to confront problems. As a leader, you have to confront problems, there’s never been a great leader that would have done that.”

Trump spoke of his administration’s efforts to help develop therapeutics and vaccines and mentioned he was on one of the therapeutics already. He received a single-dose shot of a cocktail of antibodies before his hospitalisation and has since started off on a five-day course of remdesivir.

The president sounded eager to return to the campaign trail and said he hoped to be “back soon” and looked forward to “finishing up the campaign, the way it was started and the way we’ve been doing the kind of numbers that we’ve been doing”.

Trump, in fact, was trailing his Democratic rival Joe Biden by a wide margin in national polls ahead of the November 3 presidential elections. He has failed to narrow the gap despite his best efforts to portray Biden as mentally unsuitable for the job, weak on law and order, and a “Trojan Horse” for the Democratic party’s progressives.

With the president in hospital for now, his campaign on Saturday launched “Operation MAGA (short for Make American Great Again, the campaign slogan)”, a plan to carrying on without him.

Vice-President Mike Pence will take the lead in in-person election events, but only after October 7, when he debates Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival.

“Operation MAGA will fire up the entire MAGA universe to keep President Trump’s campaign at full speed until our Commander-in-Chief returns to the campaign trail,” Bill Stepien, Trump 2020 campaign manager, said in a statement. Stepien himself has tested positive and is working remotely.