Ashley Biden, the daughter of President Joe Biden and Jill Biden, has COVID-19 and is no longer accompanying her mother on a trip through Latin America, the White House said Wednesday.
She is not considered a close contact to either of her parents, said Michael LaRosa, the first lady’s spokesperson. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said it had been “several days” since the president and first lady last saw their daughter.
Ashley Biden’s positive test result was announced just before Jill Biden’s flight Wednesday to Ecuador, the first stop on her six-day Latin America trip. The first lady also planned to visit Panama and Costa Rica before returning to Washington next week.
It’s the second time that the coronavirus has caused Ashley Biden, 40, to miss out on traveling abroad with her mother.
Earlier in May, she was bumped from the first lady’s trip to Eastern Europe to visit with Ukrainian refugees after learning that she had been a close contact of someone who later tested positive for COVID-19. Ashley Biden had tested negative after that exposure, LaRosa said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines “close contact” with an infected person as spending 15 minutes or more with them over a 24-hour period. The CDC says people with “close contact” do not need to quarantine if they are up to date on their vaccines but should wear well-fitting masks around other people for 10 days after the contact.
Total Doses Distributed = 738,312,155. Total Doses Administered = 582,757,136. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 258,008,907. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 220,739,345.
President Joe Biden’s top health official tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, the latest member of his Cabinet to be infected with the virus.
U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra tested positive while visiting Berlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said. Becerra, who is fully vaccinated and boosted, was experiencing mild symptoms.
HHS spokeswoman Sarah Lovenheim said he will continue to work in isolation in Berlin.
Becerra was last at the White House last Thursday. He is not considered a close contact of Biden.
Becerra was in Berlin for a meeting of health ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy nations on Thursday and Friday. The meeting’s focus is on drawing lessons from the coronavirus pandemic, protecting the vulnerable and unvaccinated from COVID-19, and how to ease the strain on health systems.
On Tuesday, Becerra met with Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach. He separately met the head of Germany’s disease control agency, Lothar Wieler, two of the country’s top virus experts and the management of Berlin’s biggest hospital, Charite.
None of their offices immediately responded to requests for comment.
Pictures posted on social media of the meetings with Wieler showed the men standing close together outside without masks, but wearing masks while indoors.
Prior to Berlin, Becerra attended a meeting of health ministers in Bali, Indonesia.
A wave of coronavirus cases has spread recently through Washington’s political class, infecting Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House staffers and lawmakers including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The COVID-19 pandemic could get worse in the U.S. in the weeks ahead, officials said Wednesday, and more people could be advised to again wear masks indoors.
Increasing numbers of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations are putting more of the country under guidelines issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that call for masking and other infection precautions.
For an increasing number of areas “we urge local leaders to encourage use of prevention strategies like masks in public indoor settings and increasing access to testing and treatment,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said during a White House briefing with reporters.
However, officials were cautious about making concrete predictions, saying how much worse the pandemic gets will depend on several factors, including to what degree previous infections will protect against new variants.
Last week, White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned in an interview with The Associated Press the U.S. will be increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress doesn’t swiftly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments.
Jha warned that without additional funding from Congress for the virus would cause “unnecessary loss of life” in the fall and winter, when the U.S. runs out of treatments.
He added the U.S. was already falling behind other nations in securing supplies of the next generation of COVID-19 vaccines and said that the domestic manufacturing base of at-home tests is already drying up as demand drops off.
Jha said domestic test manufactures have started shuttering lines and laying off workers, and in the coming weeks will begin to sell off equipment and prepare to exit the business of producing tests entirely unless the U.S. government has money to purchase more tests, like the hundreds of millions it has sent out for free to requesting households this year.
That would leave the U.S. reliant on other countries for testing supplies, risking shortages during a surge, Jha warned. About 8.5 million households placed orders for the latest tranche of 8 free tests since ordering opened on Monday, Jha added.
The pandemic is now 2 1/2 years old. And the U.S. has seen — depending how you count them — five waves of COVID-19 during that time, with the later surges driven by mutated versions of the coronavirus. A fifth wave occurred mainly in December and January, caused by the omicron variant.
The omicron variant spread much more easily than earlier versions.
Some experts are worried the country now is seeing signs of a sixth wave, driven by an omicron subvariant. On Wednesday, Walensky noted a steady increase in COVID-19 cases in the past five weeks, including a 26% increase nationally in the last week.
Hospitalizations also are rising, up 19% in the past week, though they remain much lower than during the omicron wave, she said.
In late February, as that wave was ebbing, the CDC released a new set of measures for communities where COVID-19 was easing its grip, with less of a focus on positive test results and more on what’s happening at hospitals.
Walensky said more than 32% of the country currently live in an area with medium or high COVID-19 community levels, including more than 9% in the highest level, where CDC recommends that masks and other mitigation efforts be used.
In the last week, an additional 8% of Americans were living in a county in medium or high COVID-19 community levels.
Officials said they are concerned that waning immunity and relaxed mitigation measures across the country may contribute to a continued rise in infections and illnesses across the country. They encouraged people — particularly older adults — to get boosters.
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Germany plans to spend another 830 million euros ($872 million) to buy new coronavirus vaccines that will allow the country to deal with a series of possible variants this fall, the health minister said Wednesday.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said that the government, via the European Union, already has ordered enough of the existing vaccines and of one that has been developed by Germany’s BioNTech to counter the omicron variant. He said the new funding is earmarked for a vaccine being developed by Moderna to tackle both omicron and other variants.
“We are betting on a broad portfolio of vaccines; we must be prepared for all eventualities,” Lauterbach said. “We don’t know what variants will confront us in the fall.”
“One lesson from the pandemic is that we never again want to have too little vaccine,” he added, alluding to the sluggish start early last year of the EU’s and Germany’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign. “We want to be able to offer all those who need or want it a fourth shot.”
The minister left open, however, whether a fourth vaccine shot will be recommended for everyone, saying that will depend on what variant comes later this year.
The existing recommendation from Germany’s independent vaccine advisory panel, issued in February, calls for an additional booster for people aged 70 and above among other high-risk groups, including residents of nursing homes, people with immunodeficiency and medical staff.
At present there is little demand for vaccinations in Germany, with an average of only 48,000 shots administered per day over the past week. So far, only 5.6% of the population has received a second booster shot.
However, Lauterbach said that vaccination centers will be kept open and given a maximum 100 million euros per month in federal government funding.
North Korea on Wednesday reported 232,880 new cases of fever and another six deaths as leader Kim Jong Un accused officials of “immaturity” and “slackness” in handling the escalating COVID-19 outbreak ravaging across the unvaccinated nation.
The country’s anti-virus headquarters said 62 people have died and more than 1.7 million have fallen ill amid a rapid spread of fever since late April. It said more than a million people recovered but at least 691,170 remain in quarantine.
Outside experts say most of the illnesses would be COVID-19, although North Korea has been able to confirm only a small number of COVID-19 cases since acknowledging an omicron outbreak last week, likely because of insufficient testing capabilities.
A failure to control the outbreak could have dire consequences in North Korea, considering its broken health care system and its rejection of internationally offered vaccines that has left a population of 26 million unimmunized.
The outbreak is almost certainly greater than the fever tally, considering the lack of tests and resources to monitor the sick, and there’s also suspicion that North Korea is underreporting deaths to soften the blow for Kim, who already was navigating the toughest moment of his decade in power. The pandemic has further damaged an economy already broken by mismanagement and U.S.-led sanctions over Kim’s nuclear weapons and missiles development.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Kim during a ruling party Politburo meeting on Tuesday criticized officials over their early pandemic response, which he said underscored “immaturity in the state capacity for coping with the crisis” and blamed the vulnerability on their “non-positive attitude, slackness and non-activity.”
He urged officials to strengthen virus controls at workplaces and make “redoubled efforts” to improve the supply of daily necessities and stabilize living conditions, the KCNA said Wednesday.
Kim’s comments came days after he ripped officials over how they were handling the distribution of medicine released from state reserves and mobilized his army to help transport the supplies to pharmacies in capital Pyongyang, which were made open 24 hours to deal with the crisis.
Before acknowledging COVID-19 infections last Thursday, North Korea had insisted of a perfect record in keeping out the virus that has reached nearly ever corner of the world, a claim that was widely doubted. But its extremely strict border closure, large-scale quarantines and propaganda that stressed anti-virus controls as a matter of “national existence” may have staved off a huge outbreak until now.
It’s unclear whether the North’s admission of a COVID-19 outbreak communicates a willingness to accept outside help. Kim’s government had shunned millions of vaccine shots offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, likely because of international monitoring requirements attached to them.
It has so far ignored rival South Korea’s offer to provide vaccines, medicine and health personnel, but experts say the North may be more willing to accept help from its main ally China. South Korea’s government said it couldn’t confirm media reports that North Korea flew multiple planes to bring back emergency supplies from China on Tuesday.
North Korean officials during Tuesday’s meeting continued to express confidence that the country could overcome the crisis on its own, with the Politburo members discussing ways for “continuously maintaining the good chance in the overall epidemic prevention front,” KCNA said.
While Kim was seen wearing masks for the first time following North Korea’s admission of COVID-19 infections last week, state media photos of Tuesday’s meeting showed Kim and Politburo members engaging in discussions barefaced, in a possible expression of confidence.
