CASES RISING AMONG LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN D.C. ON JAN. 6

More than 25 million people in the U.S. have been infected

A rising number of coronavirus cases among law enforcement and others in Washington, D.C., on Jan 6 is raising concerns that the protests and riot were superspreader events.

Since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, 38 U.S. Capitol Police employees have tested positive for the coronavirus, the head of the officers union said Saturday. Cases are also climbing among members of the District of Columbia National Guard stationed around the Capitol.

The head of the labor committee for the Capitol Police officers’ Fraternal Order of Police chapter, Gus Papathanasiou, said there was no breakdown on how many were officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but he noted that most civilian employees in the department telework and would not have been there during the riot.

“It’s mostly officers and supervisors, all sworn personnel” who have contracted the potentially deadly virus, Papathanasiou said. “Who knows if it’s going to increase?” There were about 1,400 Capitol Police officers on duty.

During the attack on the Capitol, officers were trying to maintain a safe distance, Papathanasiou said, “but everyone’s on top of each other. Then when you’ve got pepper spray and pepper balls being used, people are coughing and bodily fluids are all over the place.” Federal officials estimate roughly 800 rioters invaded the Capitol that afternoon.

Papathanasiou said the officers union is pushing the department to do more to get officers vaccinated to protect against COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Eva Malecki, spokeswoman for the Capitol Police, did not respond Saturday to questions about the number of viral infections reported within the department. On Friday, she said one of acting chief Yogananda Pittman’s “top priorities is to provide USCP officers with the opportunity to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, as the vaccine becomes more readily available to first responders.”

A Defense Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Friday that coronavirus cases among the thousands of National Guard members who have been stationed at the Capitol in the past two weeks continue to climb, pushing some of them into isolation in hotel rooms in the region. The District National Guard was aware of at least 170 cases as of Friday, with more positive results expected.

Since Jan. 6, 82 members of the District police have tested positive for the virus, according to statistics posted by the department. But the department has not been “able to ascertain if officers who have tested positive for COVID-19 contracted it as a result of working during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6,” Officer Hugh Carew said Saturday. He noted that District police officers have continued to work around the city since that day and so might have contracted the virus elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has tallied more than 25 million cases since the beginning of the pandemic, reaching the threshold Saturday afternoon, according to a New York Times database.

Experts say that as staggering as that figure is, it significantly understates the true number of people in the country who have been infected and the scope of the nation’s failure to contain the spread of the virus.

The official tally works out to about one in every 13 people in the country, or about 7.6 percent of the population.

“Twenty-five million cases is an incredible scale of tragedy,” said Caitlin Rivers, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who called the coronavirus pandemic one of the worst public health crises in history.

As a result, deaths in the country have also inexorably risen, with more than 414,000 linked to the virus. That’s one death out of roughly every 800 people in the country.

Starting with the first reported case in the country last January, it took the United States more than nine months to reach 10 million cases. That milestone was passed on Nov. 8, just before a holiday surge that accelerated the rate of new infections and brought weeks of recordshattering hospitalizations and deaths. By the last day of 2020, the country had added another 10 million cases in just seven weeks.

Getting to 25 million took about three more weeks.