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PBS Newshour White House correspondent, Yamiche Alcindor, reports that Vice-President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, have tested negative for coronavirus today.
Yamiche Alcindor
(@Yamiche)CONFIRMED: Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence tested negative for COVID-19 today again, a White House official tells me.
So for three days in row, both have been negative for COVID.
Despite Trump and others in his inner circle testing positive for the virus, Pence is scheduled to continue making public appearances on behalf of the White House and on behalf of the Trump 2020 presidential campaign. The first vice-presidential debate is Wednesday.
There are some who are concerned Pence should be taking extra precautions because he is first in the line of succession should Trump become unable to perform his presidential duties.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told NBC News’ Meet the Press on Sunday that he did not have concerns about Pence’s travel.
“The vice president takes it very serious all of these measures,” Miller said. “Anyone around the vice president are tested. People are kept very safe.”
Updated
at 2.43pm EDT
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has just announced his intentions to reverse the reopening of nine neighborhoods after they had a Covid-19 testing positivity rate above 3% for the past seven days.
The mayor said he wants to close nonessential business and schools in the South Brooklyn and Central Queens neighborhoods. The state government must approve such a move and de Blasio said city officials would meet with the officials in the hopes of having the closures begin on Wednesday.
De Blasio said the plan was “to rewind in these nine ZIP codes, to rewind, to go back, to address the problems by using the tools we know work.”
The areas affected include portions of Far Rockaway, Borough Park, Midwood, Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay and Kew Gardens. Many of them have large populations of Orthodox Jews and health officials have targeted outreach to try and manage outbreaks in those communities.
New York City was a center of the global outbreak in the spring, but had seen some relief in recent months. The state’s infection rate had been below 1% for 37 days straight as of 13 September but health officials were on alert last week as cases increased in some areas.
Updated
at 2.44pm EDT
Experts react to latest briefing by Trump’s doctors
Dr Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician at the Medical University of South Carolina, is among those with questions following the latest briefing of the president’s doctors.
She is one of those trying to understand how the president might be discharged tomorrow after he has been experiencing oxygen level drops and is on steroids.
Kuppalli also makes the point steroids can cause delirium or confusion in patients and says she is “curious as to why @VP is not currently in charge”.
Dr.Krutika Kuppalli
(@KrutikaKuppalli)Just as a recap, #Trump has received the following (AFAIK)
– REGN-COV2
– Remdesivir
– DecadronThis does not sound like a person who was admitted to #WalterReedMedicalCenter as a “precaution”. These are heavy duty medications being given to a person who is likely pretty sick.
Dr.Krutika Kuppalli
(@KrutikaKuppalli)One thing for everyone to remember, steroids suppress the ability for the body to mount a febrile response. So now that @realDonaldTrump is on Decadron saying that “he didn’t have a fever” really tells us nothing.
We need to understand how he is doing clinically
On Thursday afternoon Donald Trump held a roundtable of 19 top Republican donors at Bedminster, his 36-hole golf course in New Jersey, where he vented his frustrations about how his push for a rapid vaccine against Covid-19 was being undermined by the deep state.
According to a description of the meeting recorded on video by one of the donors present, “the president said that the approval for vaccines has been slowed down for political reasons by people who wanted to hurt him”.
The president’s attack on scientists within his own administration seems to have impressed the donors around the table. But what they didn’t know at that time, because Trump did not tell them, was that just a few hours earlier one of Trump’s closest aides, Hope Hicks, had herself tested positive for the disease.
As Trump embarks on a personal battle against coronavirus, having received his own positive result in the early hours of Friday and now having gone to hospital, expressions of concern have flooded in from around the world. Political animosities that have been raging across the country have temporarily been suspended as adversaries wish the president and the also infected first lady a speedy recovery.
But the outpouring of goodwill has not prevented questions being asked about how, when and why the president contracted this potentially life-threatening illness that has already claimed the lives of at least 208,000 Americans. At the center of these inquiries is the Bedminster fundraising event, which the White House allowed to go ahead even after it became known that Hicks had fallen ill.
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Updated
at 11.30am EDT
One man was not surprised by revelations that Donald Trump does not deserve his reputation as a preternaturally successful businessman and deal maker. The man who helped create the illusion.
Tony Schwartz spent hundreds of hours with Trump to ghostwrite his bestselling 1987 book The Art of the Deal, effectively creating the origin story of the brash property tycoon. It was Schwartz who coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole”, which neatly foreshadowed Trump and his supporters’ attempts to rationalize many of his false and misleading claims.
The 68-year-old writer has long disowned the president as a malignant narcissist and expressed regret for his part in constructing the mythology. So the New York Times report, detailing chronic financial losses and vast outstanding loans, confirmed his view that Trump was always better at cutting fantasy deals than making real ones.
“It’s the ultimate unmasking of the emperor with no clothes,” Schwartz said by phone from Riverdale in the Bronx, New York. “There’s nothing more important to Trump than being seen as very, very rich, which is why he’s expended so much effort in trying to claim a net worth far beyond what he actually was worth.
“The fact the evidence is unequivocal that he was not the person he claimed to be means that he’s lost the central premise on which he’s based his own self-worth, because Trump confuses personal worth with net worth. There’s nothing Trump hates more than to feel weak and vulnerable and like a failure, so he won’t allow himself to acknowledge those feelings, but they’ll be there and they will affect him.
“Unfortunately, should he be re-elected, one of the ways he’ll respond to that is he’ll take it out on everyone who he thinks diminished or belittled him along the way.”
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