Source: NJ.com.
We’ll probably never see a count of all the COVID-19 cases generated by the White House Rose Garden cluster event. The White House won’t allow CDC to do contact tracing, nor will the White House itself do contact tracing.
I lost count somewhere around 19 persons directly infected, the last of which has now caused the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to go into quarantine.
"It's not clear how (Adm. Charles) Ray was infected, though he did attend a White House ceremony on Sept. 27, just one day after President Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee. Multiple people at that event contracted COVID."
Source: NPR
But the one infected person I’m keeping in mind is the former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. He is a high-risk individual, due mainly to severe asthma and a degree of obesity.
And so far, it looks like he’s following the classic rule of reporting on the health of a politician: No news is (probably) bad news. (See Post #846, and bottom of Post #848).
Now, we can’t be sure of that. But as these things go, any good news tends to be publicized immediately. And so you have to infer that a lack of news at the minimum means a lack of good news, and in all likelihood means means bad news.
It appears that the only coverage of Governor Christie is in the New Jersey press. He “checked himself into the hospital” on Saturday. He had a 10-minute conversation with a reporter on Monday morning. And nobody has heard from him, via any means (voice, text, tweet), or has gotten an update on his status, since that time.
Based on Medicare data, the 50th percentile for hospital length-of-stay for Medicare-paid COVID-9 cases is 7 days. (Which is actually seven nights in the hospital, as these things are counted.) Governor Christie has now been hospitalized for four days. So, absent any hard information, the next marker comes this Saturday. If he hasn’t been discharged by then, the reasonable assumption would be that he’s pretty severely ill.
At this point, the national news media seem to have forgotten Governor Christie. Has the Trump administration done the same? Will anyone in the Trump administration, unprompted, mention his name, publicly wish him well, publicly express some degree of concern for him or his family, and so on. Will he even merit a pro-forma “our thoughts and prayers are with you”? Or, if he is seriously ill, will they do their best to toss him down the memory hole? That’s the second thing I’ll be keeping an eye on.
