Trump to Visit CDC Today After Virus Concern Disrupted Trip
Trump Says CDC Trip Called Off Over Suspected Coronavirus Case
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump will visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Friday, a trip that initially was canceled because of concern that someone at the agency may have contracted the coronavirus.
The president will stop at the CDC before he goes to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend according to a revised White House schedule. Trump is first traveling to Nashville, where he said he’ll meet with the governor of Tennessee.
Trump said earlier Friday that the CDC trip had been canceled but that the person was found not to have the virus.
“They’re trying to work it out,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for Tennessee. “They thought there was a problem at CDC with somebody that had the virus. It turned out negative. So we are seeing if we can do it.”
A White House official said earlier Friday that Trump’s CDC trip had been canceled because the president didn’t want to interfere with the agency’s work.
There are more than 200 cases of the virus in the U.S. and 14 people have died, most of them in King County, Washington, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Vice President Mike Pence on Monday said Trump would visit the CDC in Atlanta by the end of the week, part of the president’s effort to show his personal engagement in the fight against the virus. Trump went to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, on Tuesday.
Also on Friday, Trump signed a $7.8 billion emergency coronavirus spending bill that lawmakers passed this week. The amount of money provided in the legislation far exceeds Trump’s original request -- $1.25 billion in new funds and another $1.25 billion from other government social and health programs.
Lawmakers said they expect Congress will have to provide more emergency funding before the virus outbreak subsides.
Trump on Thursday downplayed the risk to the U.S. economy -- and his re-election -- posed by the coronavirus. “Everybody has to be calm,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “It’s going to all work out.”
--With assistance from Mario Parker.
To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
