Six White House aides and a Trump campaign adviserincluding Mr Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump's chief of staffhave contracted the coronavirus, officials said, raising fears of another outbreak sweeping through the ranks of the nation's top officials as cases surge to record levels in the country.
Mr Meadows, who routinely shrugged off the need to wear masks and embraced Mr Trump's strategy of playing down the threat from the coronavirus, informed a small group of White House advisers that he had tested positive for the virus last Wednesday (Nov 4).
Five other White House officials also tested positive for the virus in the days before and after Election Day.
The new wave of infections rattled and angered members of the White House staff even as they struggled to come to grips with Mr Trump's loss in the presidential race. News of the infections emerged despite warnings to keep quiet concerning the new cases.
A few weeks ago, Mr Meadows sought to keep an outbreak in VP Mike Pence's office from becoming public.
Public health experts said the infections of Mr Meadows and the others at the White House underscored the importance of taking numerous steps to prevent the spread of the virus.
Mr Meadows and Mr Trump have said repeatedly that they did not need to wear masks or maintain social distancing because they were frequently tested.
"It's emblematic of the national failure to control Covid," said Dr Tom Frieden, who served as director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention under president Barack Obama.
The new cases at the White House came as the pandemic rampaged across the United States, which has averaged more than 100,000 new cases per day over the past week and hit another record on Friday, with more than 132,700 cases in a single day.
As of Saturday morning, more than 9,830,800 people in the United States had been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 236,500 had died.
Mr Meadows is the latest in a string of people connected to the White House to contract the virus in the past seven weeks, including Mr Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, a half-dozen aides to the President and five aides to Mr Pence, including his chief of staff Marc Short.