‘Super spreader event sparked Covid outbreak at White House’
Dr Anthony Fauci says ‘people were crowded together’ at a Sept 26 ceremony in the White House Rose Garden
Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, has said that a gathering in the White House Rose Garden last month was a “super spreader event” that sparked a coronavirus outbreak.
US President Donald Trump held a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden on September 26 to honour Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
While the White House had a testing regime in place to screen for Covid-19 cases, few guests wore masks and attendees mingled and sat in close proximity to one another both indoors and outdoors.
Subsequently, the US president and several top staffers, as well as senators and military officials, have tested positive for the coronavirus disease. At least eleven people who had attended the White House event have the virus.
“The data speak for themselves,” Dr Fauci said in an interview on Friday with CBS News Radio. “We had a super spreader event in the White House. And it was in a situation where people were crowded together, were not wearing masks. So the data speaks for themselves.”
Dr Fauci said in the interview that people who are infected with the coronavirus but aren’t yet showing symptoms can transmit the pathogen to others, which makes the case for wearing face coverings.
Asymptomatic individuals “are a substantial part of the people that actually transmit infections to other people”, Dr Fauci said in the interview. “So the bet
US President Donald Trump is seen on the Truman Balcony of the White House in Washington, DC shortly after returning from a hospital in Bethesda.
ter part of the recommendation would be everybody wear a mask, literally universally.”
Trump was hospitalised last week after testing positive for Covid-19. With just a few weeks to go for the November 3 election, Trump on Saturday plans to hold his first in-person event at the White House since leaving the hospital, despite questions about how far along he is in his recovery.
He has released videos in recent days saying he is well, and his doctor said in a statement on
Wednesday that Trump had been free of symptoms for the previous 24 hours.
The American president has been given several experimental Covid-19 therapies, including Gilead’s antiviral remdesivir, the steroid dexamethasone and an antibody cocktail made by Regeneron. Trump said he intends to grant an emergencyuse authorisation to the Regeneron drug, which hasn’t yet been cleared in any form by US regulators.
On Saturday, Trump will
address a crowd of supporters from a White House balcony on a “law and order” theme, an administration official said. A source familiar with the planning for the event said the crowd could be in the hundreds, and all were expected to wear masks.
Then the US president will travel on Monday to central Florida, a state crucial to his hopes of winning a second term in the election.
He will stage his first campaign rally since his coronavirus diagnosis at an airport in the
town of Sanford. The campaign did not disclose if it would be held in a hangar with doors open, as it has in the past, or entirely outside.
As Trump prepared to return to the trail, the body that oversees presidential debates said the match-up between Trump and the Democratic challenger Joe Biden, scheduled for October 15, had been formally cancelled.
Trump refused to participate in what was supposed to be the second of three debates with Biden after the Commission on
Presidential Debates switched it to a virtual contest in the wake of the president’s illness. The final debate on October 22 is still set to take place.
Questions remain about whether Trump, who announced on October 2 he had the virus, is still contagious.
Biden has sharply criticised Trump’s decision to resume campaigning. “Good luck! I wouldn’t show up unless you have a mask and can distance,” he told reporters in Paradise, Nevada.