Mike Pence is fine, but senior White House staffer says ‘scary’ to go to work

Vice-president Mike Pence is fine and will be at work Monday, his spokesman has said squashing reports he is in self-quarantine after a close aide tested positive. But the White House, America’s safest workplace, has become a “scary” place to work after recent infections, a senior official has acknowledged.

“Vice President Pence will continue to follow the advice of the White House Medical Unit and is not in quarantine,” Devin O’Malley said in a statement.

But with two staffers testing positive for Covid-19 recently and three top members of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force going into self-quarantine after contacts with one on them, the White House may not look as safe as it ought to be, with all the resources available to it.

“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president who works in the White House, said on the CBS Sunday.

On CNN, Hassett described his workplace, the West Wing that houses the president’s office and all his senior aides, as something that “with even all the testing in the world and the best medical team on Earth, is a relatively cramped place”.

A US navy personnel, who was a personal valet to the president, was the first to test positive of Covid-19 last week. The day after, Katie Miller, press secretary to the vice-president, followed bringing the virus right into the inner sanctum of the White House. She is married to Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president on immigration., and regularly attended meetings of the coronavirus task force, which s headed by her boss, the vice-president.

Though Miller was not identified as the source, three top members of the task force — Anthony Fauci, head of the national institute of allergies and infection diseases; Stephen Kahn, head of the Drug and Food Administration; Robert Redfield, head of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention— ent into self-quarantine on Saturday for “low-risk” exposure.

Questions are being asked in the aftermath if the country’s safest workplace — as described last week by the president’s chief of staff Mark Meadows — what does it say for businesses, manufacturers and offices that are reopening and have far fewer resources to draw upon.

Large parts of America are gearing up to reopen or have reopened as the rise in infections and fatalities continued to slow down. Deaths went up by 731 over the last 24 hours, in what is possibly the lowest single-day toll in weeks, to 79,531; and infections went up by 19,710 to 1.32 million.

New York state, the epicenter of the American epidemic, accounted for more than a third of both the infections and fatalities with 1.8 million 26,641 respectively.