KATE Garraway issued an update on her husband’s health as she returned to Good Morning Britain on Monday.

The ITV presenter confirmed the reason behind Derek Draper’s recent return to hospital has been “life-threatening” sepsis.

The 55-year-old returned to presenting duties after she “dramatically disappeared” for three weeks to be by her husband’s side.

Derek Draper, a 54-year-old former political adviser, fell seriously ill with coronavirus in March 2020 and, despite now being free of the virus, he has suffered long-lasting damage to his organs and requires daily care.

Kate Garraway issues update on husband on return to ITV GMB

Ms Garraway told co-host Richard Madeley: "I dramatically disappeared and haven’t been here for three weeks now… We were on air and Derek had come out of hospital, he’s been going in and out of hospital for a while for looking at ways to tackle the damage caused by Covid back in 2020.

“But we haven’t really had any sort of medical eruptions, and then he just was really unwell.

“He’d come out of hospital the day before and (I) got a phone call from the person who was looking after him saying, ‘right, we’re really worried’, so I whizzed home, and it just sort of went ‘boom’ from there.”

What is Sepsis?

Mr Draper was taken to hospital where Ms Garraway said they discovered he had “very severe sepsis, life-threatening sepsis”.

Sepsis occurs when the body overreacts to an infection and starts to damage its own tissues and organs.

It can be fatal and is notoriously hard to spot.

Ms Garraway said: “So it was really dramatic; brilliant work by the A&E, absolutely extraordinary because when you’ve got sepsis, the big challenge is (to) find the source of infection quickly and get the right antibiotics and his blood pressure was so low…”.

“He’s still in hospital, not in intensive care, waiting for another procedure, looking really good.

“So fingers crossed on everything and particularly one kidney looking really good, just need to look at the other one, and so yeah, he’s still in (a) high dependency (unit).”

Ms Garraway added that it was “not clear yet really exactly why he’s only developed this, probably due to Covid, but that’s to come. The important thing is, is we’re back on the right side of it now.”