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Trump’s Chief of Staff Test COVID-19 Positive As U.S Records 9,830,800 Cases

Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff who abided by President Trump’s efforts to play down the coronavirus throughout the summer, has contracted the virus himself, a senior administration official said on Friday night.
Mr Meadows tested positive for the virus on Wednesday, the official said, and he told a small group of advisers. A Trump campaign adviser, Nick Trainer, has also learned he has the virus, a person briefed on his diagnosis said.

And four other White House officials tested positive for the virus, a person familiar with the diagnoses told The New York Times. Bloomberg News also reported on the additional cases.

One White House official, who asked for anonymity because the official was not allowed to speak publicly about internal discussions, said people were told to keep quiet about the various cases. That follows how Mr Meadows reacted when there was an outbreak in Vice President Mike Pence’s office a few weeks ago. At the time, Mr Meadows sought to keep those cases from becoming public.

His diagnosis 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 on Friday, with more than 132,700 cases in a single day.

As of Saturday morning, more than 9,830,800 people in the United States had been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 236,500 had died.

Mr Meadows is only the latest in a string of people connected to the White House to contract the virus in the past seven weeks, including Mr Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, a half-dozen aides to the president and five aides to Mr Pence, including his chief of staff, Marc Short.

At least one event at the White House — a celebration of Mr Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — is suspected of being a “superspreader” after more than a dozen aides, reporters and guests who attended the event 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.

Mr Trump has spent most of the pandemic minimizing the threat of the virus, and several White House officials have nurtured his desire to treat it as a localized threat in Democratic-leaning states.

On Tuesday night, Mr Meadows was at Mr Trump’s election party at the White House, which featured several hundred people gathered in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled while watching the election returns.

The president’s chief of staff was also in contact with a coterie of aides earlier in the day at the Trump campaign headquarters in Virginia, crammed into a tight space, where he was not wearing a mask as the president greeted campaign workers.

During the pandemic, Mr Meadows has encouraged Mr Trump’s desire to minimize the threat of the virus and focus instead on the economy. He was dismissive of mask-wearing in the White House and wore one only very sporadically as he travelled with the president or during events in the Oval Office.

Like Mr Trump, Mr Meadows often mocked reporters who wore masks around him, saying the face coverings muffled their voices. A video clip of Mr Meadows refusing to give a statement to reporters at the Capitol because they asked him to wear his mask was widely shared across social media.

He has also been among the West Wing officials who have favoured minimizing the public appearances of Dr Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who has issued far more dire warnings about the threat of the virus than Mr Trump has wanted to have publicly declared.

“We are not going to control the pandemic,” Mr Meadows told Jake Tapper, the host of “State of the Union” on CNN. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.”

Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

Mr Meadows was one of few people fully briefed on Mr Trump’s own bout of Covid-19, which the president announced on Oct. 2. He was involved in coaxing a reluctant Mr Trump to go voluntarily to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at a time when the president was resisting such a move but his oxygen levels had dropped and he had a high fever.

But he also had a starring role in an episode that enraged Mr Trump the day after the president was flown to the hospital. After Mr Trump’s doctor, Sean P. Conley, did not answer questions honestly about the president’s symptoms, Mr Meadows approached a small group of reporters in the White House pool and gave a more candid assessment that the president was not quite out of the woods.

He gave it on the assumption he would not be identified, but a C-SPAN camera captured Mr Meadows talking to the reporters. Mr Trump was livid when he learned that Mr Meadows had said something revealing about his medical condition.

A few weeks later, when Mr Short and four other aides to Mr Pence fell ill, The Times reported that Mr Meadows had sought to keep the information secret.

The New York Times

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