Six in the White House test positive for virus
Six White House aides and a Trump campaign adviser — including Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff — have contracted the coronavirus, officials said, raising fears of another outbreak sweeping through the ranks of the nation’s top officials as cases surge to record levels in the country.
Meadows, who routinely shrugged off the need to wear masks and embraced Trump’s strategy of playing down the threat from the coronavirus over the summer, informed a small group of White House advisers that he had tested positive for the virus Wednesday, a senior administration official said Friday.
Five other White House officials also tested positive for the virus in the days before and after Election Day, people familiar with the diagnoses told The New York Times. Bloomberg News also reported on additional cases around the president, who contracted the virus last month and spent three days in the hospital receiving experimental treatments.
Nick Trainer, who worked on the president’s campaign, also has tested positive for the coronavirus, a person briefed on his diagnosis said.
The new wave of infections rattled and angered members of the White House staff even as they struggled to come to grips with Trump’s likely loss in the presidential race. News of the infections emerged despite warnings to keep quiet about the new cases, according to two White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss internal conversations.
A few weeks ago, Meadows sought to keep an outbreak in Vice President Mike Pence’s office from becoming public.
Public health experts said the infections of Meadows and the others at the White House underscored the importance of taking numerous steps to prevent the spread of the virus. Meadows and Trump have said repeatedly that they did not need to wear masks or maintain social distancing because they were frequently tested.
“It’s emblematic of the national failure to control COVID,” said Tom Frieden, who served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Barack Obama. “It shows the fallacy of relying on testing alone. Testing doesn’t replace other safety measures. It’s just one tool among many.”
The new cases at the White House 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, 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 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, half a dozen aides to the president and five aides to Pence, including his chief of staff, Marc Short. Several journalists who work at the White House also were infected. On Saturday, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-fla., a close ally of Trump’s, disclosed that he had tested positive for virus antibodies Tuesday but said that he did not know when he had contracted the virus.
At least one gathering at the White House — a cel
ebration of Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Sept. 26 — is suspected of being a superspreader event after more than a dozen aides, reporters and guests who were in attendance 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.
Frieden said it was possible the new cases, including Meadows’, may actually be part of the same outbreak from late September rather than a separate cluster of cases. That would suggest that the White House has not gotten control of the virus as it spreads through the West Wing.
“It may be the same cluster that has continued for well over a month,” Frieden said. “You’re not going to control it if you don’t try to control it.”