Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Friday he and his wife are free of the Wuhan coronavirus. President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and presidential adviser Hope Hicks tested positive for the same late Thursday.
“I am feeling fantastic,” Pompeo told reporters traveling with him to Croatia. “I was tested about 30 minutes ago. That would be the fourth time I was tested in the course of the last two and a half weeks. I remember the dates: 16th, 24th, 27th, and now October 2nd.”
Pompeo said his wife Susan was tested at roughly the same time, and her results also came back negative.
“I actually have not been with the President since the Abraham Accords on the 15th,” he noted, referring to the White House signing ceremony between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. “I’ve been traveling, I can’t remember, ten of the last, 12 of the last 17 days, something like that.”
“We’re praying for the president and the first lady, that they’ll have a speedy recovery,” Pompeo said.
“I spoke with the vice president’s office this morning as well. We’re taking this, obviously, very seriously, and we’ll do everything we can to keep everyone safe, including you all,” he told his press pool.
Pompeo said he would evaluate his travel schedule in light of the coronavirus news and would take precautions including contract tracing for members of his team who have visited the White House recently. He said he would most likely proceed with planned trips to Florida on Saturday and Asia on Sunday.
“We’ll spend the next few hours and try to figure out what the medical team says. I’ve talked to my doctor back in Washington, the State Department medical team. They said it would be perfectly fine to make both of those trips, but we’re going to continue to look at it,” he said.
“We’ll certainly be careful,” Pompeo promised. “But we have been awful careful for months and months and months, and we’re doing our best to keep everybody safe, all my whole team, everybody who’s both back in Washington and traveling as well.”
The Secretary of State said that everyone on his team is “feeling good,” and none have displayed any symptoms of illness.
“Anybody who says they’ve got a symptom or something, we’ll make sure to take extra special care of them, but we feel like we’re in pretty good shape,” he said. “The medical team has cleared us to take this next stop here in Croatia, and we’ll do that, and then we’ll hop back on the plane and I’ll give you a further update then, it’ll be morning time in Washington.”
President Trump canceled a rally he was due to hold in Sanford, Florida, on Friday evening in light of his positive coronavirus test results. Secretary Pompeo is scheduled to give a keynote address to the Florida Family Policy Council on Saturday in Orlando.
Pompeo is then scheduled to travel to Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea beginning on Sunday, his first visit to East Asia since July 2019.
His itinerary includes attending the “Quad” meeting of foreign ministers from India, Australia, and Japan on Tuesday, an important security alliance against China’s growing influence in the region.
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