United States First Lady Jill Biden tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday evening and was experiencing mild symptoms.
Despite the first lady contracting the virus, President Joe Biden himself was found not to have been infected. Her communications director, Elizabeth Alexander, said the 72-year-old will stay at her Rehoboth Beach, Delaware home. It was also revealed that the first lady had gotten the vaccine and received boosters.
Jill Biden Tests Positive for COVID-19
The latest diagnosis is the First Lady's second COVID-19 diagnosis, where the first positive test happened in August 2022, which occurred shortly after the president himself tested positive for COVID-19.
The Democratic president, who tested negative on Monday evening, returned to DC from Delaware by himself. The Bidens were staying in their vacation home over the weekend after visiting Florida on Saturday to survey the destruction left by Hurricane Idalia.
When President Biden visited Philadelphia on Monday for a Labor Day event, the first lady opted to stay in Delaware. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre released a statement saying that the 80-year-old president will test at a regular cadence this week and will have symptoms monitored, as per Politico.
The president is scheduled to leave for India later this week to attend the coming G-20 summit, and he then plans to fly to Vietnam over the coming weekend before returning to the United States.
The situation comes as a new COVID-19 variant, the Pirola variant, has been detected by doctors in various states, including Michigan, New York, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. However, experts said they are unsure if it is more transmissible or fatal than the virus' other variants.
Pirola, referred to as BA.2.86, is a highly mutated variant of the Omicron strain of the coronavirus. The latter emerged in 2021 and quickly became the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States.
Spread of the Coronavirus
In a statement, Dr. Scott Roberts, an infectious disease specialist, said that when Omicron surfaced in the winter of 2021, there was a massive surge in COVID-19 cases. He argued that it was no different from the Delta variant and was able to evade immunity from both natural infection and vaccination, according to the New York Post.
At the time, medical professionals warned that there was reason to worry about the variant because it had more than 30 mutations to its spike protein. Roberts noted that such many mutations were notable and worrisome for experts.
Public health authorities have also noted increased COVID-19 infections across the United States in the last few weeks. But, the total number of cases remains low, and experts believe that the US will not experience another dangerous wave of illness comparable to the ones during the height of the deadly pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
While the new variant is responsible for fewer infections in general, it has shown more than the usual amount of mutations from the original COVID-19 strain. This fact concerns scientists because it could be evasive to vaccines, said the New York Times.
