Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday there’s likely to be more cases of COVID-19 infection that sickened President Donald Trump and several others who are close to him.
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” Gottlieb said it appears the initial contact with an infected person might have been either Sept. 25 or Sept. 26 — the day of a Rose Garden introduction of Trump’s Supreme Court justice nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
“Anyone who was with the President Tuesday, Wednesday is not in the clear,” he said, calculating the period of time before there are symptoms of infection from the coronavirus.
“It sounds like he might have become symptomatic Wednesday, so he probably became infected on Friday or Saturday, at one of the events he was at,” he added.
According to Gottlieb, the White House has “an obligation to understand how the infection was introduced into that environment,” and urged more intense contact tracing.
Of Trump’s infection, Gottlieb noted “it’s early in the course [of his] illness” and he’s “not out of the woods.”