Mike Pence will not enter quarantine despite a rash of coronavirus cases in 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 single day and plans to be at the White House tomorrow,” Devin O’Malley, a backup spokesman for Pence, said on Sunday night.
As the Trump administration urges Americans to return to workplaces and Donald Trump touts 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 halls of power.
Three members of the White House coronavirus taskforce – Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration; and Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – have entered two weeks of isolation, after having contact with someone who later tested positive.
Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee who chairs the health committee, is isolating himself after a member of staff tested positive. A senior admiral on Trump’s top military advisory committee, chief of naval operations Michael Gilday, is also isolating himself following contact with an infected relative, Bloomberg News reported. Gen Joseph Lengyel tested positive at the White House on Saturday in a spot check, before he was to meet Trump.
A valet for Trump, who had served the president food without wearing a mask, also recently tested positive. The White House is considering new rules under which aides must maintain a distance of two metres (6ft) from the president, ABC News reported.
Pence’s 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 inside the White House right now at the current state of affairs – officials recognise the contradiction in telling states to reopen while the White House enhances protocols to prevent spread of the virus,” CNN quoted an anonymous Trump administration official as saying.
On Monday morning the number of recorded Covid-19 deaths in the US was close to 80,000, and while the rate of new cases appears to be slowing in the New York City area and other sites of major outbreaks, elsewhere new infections are rising.
Nowhere is testing and contact-tracing for the virus as thoroughly as the White House, where aides and senior officials including Trump and Pence receive both spot checks and repeated testing in various forms, some on a daily basis. Without such testing, cases could go undetected, leading to a potentially wide outbreak.
Yet that is the risk Trump is urging Americans to take in the coming weeks and months as they return to work without the protection of regular testing.
On Sunday, Trump retweeted an announcement by his golf club in Los Angeles of its reopening. “So great to see our country starting to open up again!” he wrote.
“If we do this carefully, working with the governors, I don’t think there’s a considerable risk,” the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, told Fox News Sunday. “Matter of fact, I think there’s a considerable risk of not reopening. You’re talking about what would be permanent economic damage to the American public.”
But such downplaying of the risks the public faces could be undercut as the Senate holds public hearings with social distancing measures in place.
The key committee on health will convene its first public hearing on Tuesday. Alexander will chair the hearing remotely, senators attending will wear masks and be seated two metres apart, and experts including Fauci are scheduled to testify by video link.
Fauci has repeatedly contradicted, gently, Trump’s most reckless claims about the coronavirus. On Monday morning the president claimed: “Great credit being given for our Coronavirus response, except in the Fake News.”
He also addressed one Democratic-run state seeking to reopen when he wrote: “The great people of Pennsylvania want their freedom now, and they are fully aware of what that entails. The Democrats are moving slowly, all over the USA, for political purposes … Don’t play politics. Be safe, move quickly!
On Sunday, however, the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CBS’s Face the Nation it was “scary to go work”.
“I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going 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 touring the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota recently, was asked by Axios if staff should wear masks in the White House. “Some people do,” he said.
While Trump was reportedly “spooked” by the revelation that his valet had the virus, it has also been reported that he told confidants he fears he would look ridiculous in a mask and the image would appear in negative ads.
“It’s a vanity thing, I guess, with him,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on MSNBC. “You’d think, as the president of the United States, you would have the confidence to honor the guidance he’s giving the country.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
