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WASHINGTON: The White House contact tracing program is too haphazard to identify or stop a rapidly spreading COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. capital, health experts and city officials said Tuesday (6 October).
Washington reported 105 new coronavirus cases by Oct. 5, the mayor’s office said, the highest number since June.
Elected officials representing Washington and surrounding areas where many White House workers and other government workers live said they feared the Trump administration-related outbreak was “out of control.”
President Donald Trump revealed on Friday that he and his wife, Melania, were infected, and the list of people who were close to them or in the White House in the days leading up to the reveal continued to grow.
A presidential military aide and a military valet were the last to test positive for the highly contagious disease.
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Testing by White House staff is not reported with the rest of the city results, and local officials are concerned that staff and visitors could spread it to family and friends.
“We are alarmed and dismayed by the casual disregard for the health of our community, including constituents serving the White House as United States Secret Service personnel, agents or officers, journalists from the White House Correspondents Association, and the general public, “a group of Congressional Democrats representing the city and nearby Maryland and Virginia said in a statement.
An event at the White House on Sept. 26 for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was suspected of spreading infections, as was an Air Force One flight that night with Trump.
But several staff members, guests and journalists present at the event or on the flight told Reuters that the White House medical team had not contacted them.
Ideally, anyone who was in the White House the weekend before Trump said they were infected should be quarantined, “especially in this case where a cluster is emerging,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, of the Center’s think tank for Global Development, who previously led the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak.
Contact trackers should identify where the pool of infected cases was in the White House, Konyndyk said, notifying anyone near them and trying to identify the “index case” or person who likely transmitted the virus to everyone else .
They then need to go back to track that person’s movements during the previous days and notify the people the spreader was with, he said.
Instead, some White House guests, visitors and reporters are taking matters into their own hands.
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The Rev. Paul Scalia of St James Catholic Church in suburban Virginia, who attended the Sept. 26 ceremony at the Rose Garden, arranged for testing and self-quarantined as soon as he learned of the condition of the president on Friday.
“The lack of masks and social distancing at that event has become a legitimate cause for concern, especially since the COVID-19 diagnosis and the president’s hospitalization,” said Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. , in a letter to his Church. He said White House staff told him he could remove his mask after testing negative before the event.
Other politicians go about their life as usual.
In defiance of airline policy that bans those who have been exposed, three Republican members of Congress from Minnesota, Representatives Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer and Jim Hagedorn, flew home from Washington on Friday despite traveling with Trump to and from a rally in Duluth on Wednesday.
Aides to the three lawmakers, who tested negative for the coronavirus, did not respond to requests for comment on whether any contact tracing had been conducted.
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During a flight after the Sept. 26 event at the White House, an unmasked Trump returned to the back of the plane to speak to reporters, including a Reuters correspondent, who was only feet away.
New York Times correspondent Michael Shear, who was on the flight and later tested positive for the virus, told Axios that his wife also tested positive. “The collateral damage is going to be quite significant, I think,” he said.
No one in the White House had approached him to trace his contacts despite his proximity to the president, he said.
Spokesman Judd Deere said the White House has a “robust contact tracing program run by the White House Medical Unit with integration from the CDC,” adding that it was “consistent with the CDC guidelines.”
There is currently no regular testing and tracking regime for the more than 20,000 people who work in the dozen or so buildings that make up the U.S. Capitol complex.
Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have resisted establishing one, at least in part due to the large number of people involved, arguing that the 535 members Congress should not pre-empt others with a more urgent need for evidence.
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