Six White House aides and a Trump campaign adviser recently tested positive for COVID-19 including Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, who routinely dismissed the need to wear masks and supported Trump’s tactic of playing down the threat of the virus. Meadows informed a small group of White House advisers that he had tested positive on Wednesday.
Dr. Tom Frieden, who served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Former President Barack Obama, said it was possible that these new cases, including Meadows’, might actually be tied to the same outbreak that occurred in late September after Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett‘s nomination ceremony in the Rose Garden.
At the time, at least 8 attendees contracted the virus at the superspreader event, but these recent positive tests might reveal that the White House has yet to take control of the virus as it continues to spread throughout the West Wing months later.
This news comes as the number of cases continues to surge in the U.S. The country has averaged more than 100,000 new cases every day for the past week, and it hit another worldwide record on Friday with more than 132,700 cases reported in a single day. As of Saturday morning, more than 9.89 million people have been infected and more than 237,000 have died.
