Schumer tests positive for COVID amid wave of new cases
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has tested positive for the coronavirus, his spokesman said in a statement late Sunday.
The positive result came “as a part of his regular testing regimen,” said the spokesman, Justin Goodman. Schumer is fully vaccinated and “double boosted” and is experiencing very mild symptoms, Goodman said.
The majority leader was expected to meet privately with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.VA., this week to work out a spending deal that would lower health care costs and combat climate change, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the deliberations.
Goodman said Schumer will be isolating in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and working remotely. “Anyone who knows Leader Schumer knows that even if he’s not physically in the Capitol, through virtual meetings and his trademark flip phone, he will continue with his robust schedule and remain in near-constant contact with his colleagues,” he said.
Schumer joins a long list of leaders in the federal government who have tested positive for the coronavirus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-calif., tested positive in April, as did Vice President Kamala Harris. Last month, Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, also tested positive.
New coronavirus cases are up slightly in the United States this week, according to a Washington Post tracker, with about 100,000 new cases reported daily on average.
Those figures are likely to be an undercount, experts say, because many Americans have stopped testing regularly or are testing at home, where positive results are difficult to include in official tallies.
The latest offshoot of the omicron variant, BA.5, has quickly become dominant in the United States and is driving a wave of cases across the country.
BA.5 is deft at evading the human immune system. Antibodies from vaccines and previous infections offer limited protection against it. Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research who tracks pandemic trends, wrote last month that it was “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”