Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, has COVID-19

Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff who abided by President Donald Trump’s efforts to play down the coronavirus throughout the summer, has contracted the virus himself, a senior administration official said Friday night.

Meadows tested positive for the virus Wednesday, the official said, and he told a small group of advisers. A Trump campaign adviser, Nick Trainer, has also learned he has the virus, a person briefed on his diagnosis said.

And four other White House officials tested positive for the virus, a person familiar with the diagnoses told the New York Times. Bloomberg News also reported on the additional cases.

One White House official, who asked for anonymity because the official was not allowed to speak publicly about internal discussions, said people were told to keep quiet about the various cases. That follows how Meadows reacted when there was an outbreak in Vice President Mike Pence’s office a few weeks ago. At the time, Meadows sought to keep those cases from becoming public.

His diagnosis came as the pandemic rampaged across the United States, which has averaged more than 100,000 new cases per day over the past week and hit another record Friday, with more than 132,700 cases in a single day.

As of Saturday morning, more than 9,830,800 people in the United States had been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 236,500 had died.

Meadows is only the latest in a string of people connected to the White House to contract the virus in the past seven weeks, including Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, a halfdozen aides to the president and five aides to Pence.

At least one event at the White House — a celebration of Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — is suspected of being a superspreader after more than a dozen aides, reporters and guests who attended the event or came into contact with people who were there tested positive for the virus.

That event took place in the Rose Garden and inside the White House.

Meadows did not respond to a request for comment Friday night. A White House spokesman also declined to comment, citing privacy of personnel health matters.