The response ranged from wishes for a quick recovery to jabs at the President, who has routinely downplayed the threat of the virus that has killed more than a million people around the world this year.

French government spokesman Gabriel Attal struck a more critical tone. He wished the President a “swift recovery”, while speaking on French TV channel LCI, but also called Mr Trump’s positive test result “a sign that the virus spares no one, including those who are the most sceptical about its reality and gravity”.
Others had sharper words for the President. “President Trump and the first lady have paid the price for his gamble to play down the COVID-19,” tweeted Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party-controlled newspaper.
Mr Trump has repeatedly attacked China for its handling of the pandemic, which first emerged in the city of Wuhan late last year.
But the Chinese Foreign Ministry took a softer tone. Spokeswoman Hua Chunying tweeted that she was “saddened” to learn of the couple’s diagnoses. “Hope they both have a speedy recovery and will be fine,” she wrote.
Chinese officials might see Mr Trump having contracted the virus after spending months playing it down as a dose of “poetic justice”, said Jude Blanchette, the Freeman chair in China Studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
The news could serve as kindling for the Chinese Communist Party’s messaging that democratic institutions had failed to handle the global crisis, he said. But Mr Trump’s diagnosis just ahead of the US election also “throws up a number of volatilities and variables which Beijing would rather not deal with right now”.
“Mr President … I suggest that you do not try to treat yourself with bleach,” tweeted Radoslaw Sikorski, a European Parliament member and former Polish foreign minister, referencing Mr Trump’s earlier suggestions that disinfectants could serve a role as a possible treatment against the virus.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi also sent words of encouragement to the couple.
North Korea leader Kim Jong-un, who developed a close relationship with Mr Trump and has met him three times, sent the US President a “message of sympathy” and expressed hope he would recover “as soon as possible”.
Washington Post