Cancel next debate if Trump remains sick, Biden says
President may still be contagious on Oct. 15, medical experts say.
As the coronavirus outbreak at the White House spun further out of control Tuesday, Joe Biden suggested that the presidential debate next week in Miami should be canceled if President Trump is still sick with COVID- 19.
The Democratic nominee’s remarks came as medical experts questioned whether Trump could participate without endangering Biden, the moderator and the audience at the town- hall- style debate scheduled for Oct. 15.
Based on limited and at times misleading medical information released by the White House, they said, the Republican president might still be contagious next week. There’s also a chance Trump could take a turn for the worse and wind up back in the hospital, they said.
After a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., Biden said he hoped safety protocols set for the debates by the Cleveland Clinic would be followed. Asked whether he would feel safe onstage with Trump, the former vice president said, “I think if he still has COVID, we shouldn’t have a debate.”
Whether Trump will still be contagious depends on the severity of his case as defined by the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. COVID- 19 patients can safely end isolation 10 days after the onset of illness, so long as they have been free of symptoms for 24 hours, the CDC says. For severe cases, it is 20 days.
If it’s 10 days, Trump could come out of isolation this weekend — before the Miami debate. If it’s 20, it would be the week after the debate. Even if doctors clear him to debate, there’s no guarantee he won’t be contagious, especially for a long, heated quarrel indoors.
“The shouting creates a lot more aerosol, so it makes these droplets f iner, so they can linger in the air longer and potentially infect people,” said Peter Chin- Hong, a professor of medicine who specializes in infectious diseases at UC San Francisco.
Chin- Hong and others in his f ield suspect Trump’s case is severe, based partly on video showing him walking up the South Portico staircase at the White House on Monday upon returning from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“He was using a lot of muscles to breathe, he was short of breath, you can see he was pursing his lips — those are all signs that he continues to have lung involvement and active virus potentially,” he said. Chin-Hong said he would be worried about Trump debating and suggested he wear a mask if he does.
What also makes Trump’s case look serious, experts said, is that he was given oxygen twice and treated with dexamethasone, a steroid normally used just in severe COVID- 19 cases.
On Friday, White House officials said Trump had only mild symptoms. But he was hospitalized that evening, and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Saturday that Trump’s “vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning.”
Anne Rimoin, a UCLA epidemiology professor, suggested the candidates stay in different locations, as Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy did in their third presidential debate in 1960. Nixon was in Los Angeles, Kennedy in New York.
She also questioned the trustworthiness of medical information released by a White House that has refused to do full contact tracing to contain its outbreak of a disease that has killed 210,000 Americans.
“This is about understanding possibly one of the largest super- spreading events — and certainly the most high- profile one — in history,” she said. “This is a scandal of epic proportions.”
Neha Nanda, an epidemiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, said the time frame for contagion is not fixed. “It’s very nuanced, and it requires an expert opinion to decide whether the patient is ready to come out of isolation,” she said.
Trump tweeted Tuesday that he was looking forward to the debate.
As the day wore on, the cluster of infections among people close to Trump continued to grow, with his senior advisor Stephen Miller testing positive by day’s end. Others with the virus include First Lady Melania Trump, presidential advisor Hope Hicks, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, four press aides, Trump’s personal assistant Nick Luna, his former senior advisor Kellyanne Conway, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.