US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania have tested positive for coronavirus and will quarantine, injecting new uncertainty into a turbulent presidential election campaign just one month before the poll.
Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020
A letter published by the White House from Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, confirmed the diagnosis. Conley said the president and first lady are “both well at this time” and will be quarantining in the White House.
“Rest assured I expect the President to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering,” he wrote.
Melania Trump tweeted: “We are feeling good & I have postponed all upcoming engagements. Please be sure you are staying safe & we will all get through this together.”
Trump has faced criticism for his dismissive attitude toward coronavirus precautions such as the wearing of face masks. During Tuesday’s presidential debate against Biden, moderator Chris Wallace, a Fox News anchor, asked Trump about his questioning of the effectiveness of masks to prevent the spread of the pandemic.
Trump isn’t the first world leader to contract the coronavirus. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro announced in July that he’d tested positive. UK prime minister Boris Johnson recovered from COVID-19 in April, and Honduras’ president Juan Orlando Hernández was discharged from a hospital in July.
But as you’ve probably heard, it is the United States that has long become the nation struggling most with the pandemic, with the most cases and the most deaths, both of which far eclipse its percentage of the world’s population. Over 200,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone, nearly one-fifth of the 1 million people that have died worldwide.
Over the past months, Trump has famously and repeatedly insisted that the pandemic would magically “disappear,” or that the virus was largely harmless, or that it was “fading away,” among other claims.
In his recent debate against Joe Biden, he continued to downplay the need to wear a mask, stating that he puts on a mask “when I think I need it.” The CDC, among others, advises people to wear masks to prevent spreading COVID-19 to others — not necessarily to avoid contracting it yourself, and has advised even people without symptoms to get tested for COVID-19, because asymptomatic people can still contract and spread the virus.
The question now is whether Trump and his family contracting the virus will do anything to change their outlook and acceptance of the science around COVID-19, and whether the American people will change their behaviors now they’ve seen that Trump can get it too.