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Mike Pence will not be quarantined despite a series of coronavirus cases at the White House in recent days, including a positive test for the vice president’s own press secretary.
“Vice President Pence has tested negative every day and plans to be at the White House tomorrow,” Devin O’Malley, Pence’s endorsing spokesman, said in a statement Sunday night.
As the Trump administration urges Americans to return to the workplace and Donald Trump promotes a “transition to greatness“Ahead, the White House faces a delicate balancing act in projecting business as usual, even as coronavirus cases spread through the corridors of power.
Three members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force: Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr. Stephen Hahn, Commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration; and Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, went into two weeks of isolation after having contact with someone who later tested positive.
Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who chairs the health committee, was quarantined after a staff member tested positive. A senior admiral on Trump’s top military advisory committee, chief of naval operations Michael Gilday, was isolated after contact with an infected relative, Bloomberg News reported. Peak General Joseph Lengyel tested positive at the White House on Saturday at a random checkup, before meeting Trump.
A valet for Trump, who had served the president food without wearing a mask, also tested positive recently. The White House is considering new rules under which attendees must maintain a 6-foot distance from the president, ABC News reported.
Pence spokeswoman Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, one of the President’s closest aides who is in frequent close contact with the Trump family, tested positive last week. It was unclear if Stephen Miller had entered self-isolation.
“There is extreme sensitivity within the White House right now in the current state of affairs: Officials acknowledge the contradiction of telling states to reopen as the White House improves protocols to prevent the spread of the virus,” CNN said, according to an anonymous Trump administration official. .
On Monday morning, the number of deaths recorded by Covid-19 in the US USA It was close to 80,000, and while the rate of new cases appears to be declining in the New York City area and other major outbreak sites, new infections are increasing elsewhere.
Nowhere is testing and contact tracking for the virus as comprehensive as at the White House, where aides and top officials, including Trump and Pence, receive spot checks and repeated tests in various forms, some on a daily basis. Without such evidence, cases could go unnoticed and lead to a potentially wide outbreak.
However, that’s the risk Trump urges Americans to take in the coming weeks and months as they return to work without the protection of regular testing.
On Sunday, Trump retweeted a Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles announcement of its reopening.
“How good to see our country begin to open again!” the wrote
“If we do this carefully, working with the governors, I don’t think there is any considerable risk,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox News Sunday. “In fact, I think there is a considerable risk of not reopening. You are talking about what would be permanent economic harm to the American public.”
But such minimization of the risks facing the public could be undermined as the Senate holds public hearings with existing social distancing measures.
The key health committee will convene its first public hearing on Tuesday. Alexander will preside over the hearing remotely, senators in attendance will wear masks and sit 6 feet away, and experts, including Fauci, are slated to testify via video link.
Fauci has repeatedly, gently, contradicted Trump’s most reckless claims about the coronavirus. Monday morning the president reclaimed: “Great credit for our Coronavirus response, except in the Fake News.”
He also addressed a Democrat-run state that was seeking to reopen when he wrote: “The great people of Pennsylvania want their freedom now, and they are fully aware of what that implies. Democrats move slowly, across the United States, for political ends … Don’t play politics. Be careful, move fast!
On Sunday, however, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CBS’s Face the Nation that “it was scary to go to work.”
“I think he would be much safer if he were sitting at home than he would go to the west wing,” he said.
O’Malley, the Pence spokesman, said the vice president “will continue to follow the advice of the White House medical unit and is not in quarantine.” Pence himself, who notoriously did not wear a mask when he visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota recently, was asked by Axios if staff should wear masks at the White House.
“Some people do it,” he said.
While Trump was reported to be “scared” by the revelation that his valet had carried the virus, he was also reported to have told confidants that he feared he would look ridiculous in a mask and that the image would appear in negative ads. .
“It is a vanity, I suppose, with him,” House of Representatives spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi said on MSNBC. “You would think that as the president of the United States, he would have the confidence to honor the orientation he is giving to the country.”
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