How’s that? Members of the all-masks, all-the-time Biden-Harris camp, come down with cases of the coronavirus?
The Associated Press, which broke the story, reports in its headline that it was a single staffer, although the body text contradicts that claim, indicating that two members of the team tested positive. The infected individuals are Liz Allen, Harris’s communications director, and a flight crew member.
The setback will result in the decision to suspend vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s in-person events until Monday. This could prove costly, seeing as how it interrupts “the Biden campaign’s aggressive push across a wide battleground map, including North Carolina and Ohio, the next two states Harris was scheduled to visit.”
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The article quotes from a follow-up statement by Harris in which she assures her supporters that ‘both the crew member and the staff member were wearing N95 masks at all points they were near me, and our doctors believe that we were not exposed under CDC guidelines.’ She also pledged to be ‘transparent with you about any test results that I do receive. In the meantime, remember: wear a mask, practice social distancing, and wash your hands regularly. It is possible to stop the spread.’
But the advice about mask-wearing flies in the face of a “Centers for Disease Control report released in September [that] shows that masks and face coverings are not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19, even for those people who consistently wear them.”
A study conducted in the United States in July found that when they compared 154 “case-patients,” who tested positive for COVID-19, to a control group of 160 participants from the same health care facility who were symptomatic but tested negative, over 70 percent of the case-patients were contaminated with the virus and fell ill despite “always” wearing a mask.
