- After President Donald Trump and several of his top officials tested positive for Covid-19 in early October, it appears the White House now has another coronavirus cluster on its hands. The source could be an election night event in the East Room with hundreds of unmasked guests. [Vox / Katelyn Burns]
- White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was the first high-profile staffer to test positive in the Trump administration’s second outbreak. He tested positive on November 4 after attending the White House event the night before. [Bloomberg / Jennifer Jacobs, Tyler Pager, and Mario Parker]
- Meadows’s announcement comes after he mocked then-Democratic nominee and now President-elect Joe Biden for wearing masks, and he had previously refused to take questions from media members while wearing one. [NBC News / Rebecca Shabad]
- Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who was at the election night event, tested positive as well. Carson came down with the virus on Monday morning, and experienced symptoms ranging from a fever to muscle cramps to trouble breathing. [Washington Post / Ben Terris, Tracy Jan, and Seung Min Kim]
- Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski became the latest to test positive on Thursday. While Lewandowski was at the White House event on November 3, he told CNN believes he caught the virus while traveling in Philadelphia. [CNN / Jim Acosta, Kaitlan Collins, and Maegan Vazquez]
- Trump’s political director Brian Jack, adviser David Bossie, and Republican National Committee chief of staff Richard Walters have all tested positive in the last week. They join Meadows, Carson, Lewandowski, and at least eight others in the White House’s new outbreak. [NYT / Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Matthew Conlen]
- Several lower-level officials have been affected as well. Nick Trainer, a campaign aide; Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows’s top aide; and Charlton Boyd, an assistant to senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner, have all tested positive. [The Cut / Claire Lampen]
- The outbreak has also affected the Secret Service. Trump held several rallies a day in the final stretch before Election Day and had Secret Service Agents with him everywhere he went. Now more than 130 of those agents are in quarantine or isolation. [Washington Post / Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey]
- This is not the first outbreak among the Secret Service. Trump’s first rally during the pandemic — in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June — led several dozen Secret Service agents to self-quarantine due to potential exposure. [CNN / Jim Acosta and Paul LeBlanc]
- The second White House cluster comes as the US as a whole deals with record numbers of new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations. Nearly every day this week has brought a new single-day case record, and deaths are on the rise again as well. [Vox / German Lopez]
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