Pence put others at risk by campaigning after coronavirus exposure, experts say

A seven-hour international flight to Ireland this summer has been linked to 59 cases of coronavirus in the country, Irish researchers said in a report.

Thirteen of the 49 passengers onboard tested positive for the novel coronavirus, despite the flight only being 17 percent full, according to the report released last week by the Irish Department of Public Health. Those 13 passengers went on to infect 46 more people throughout Ireland, the report says, which “demonstrates the potential for spread of SARS-COV-2 linked to air travel.”

President Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, made a telling admission. “We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” suggesting that the spread of the coronavirus was a fait accompli and that containment was not a central plank of the White House’s strategy. On Friday, the United States recorded a record single-day high of more than 83,000 new cases. The next day, it was just 39 cases short of the previous mark.

It is evidence of an autumnal surge in the virus that’s buffeting both sides of the Atlantic.

About 190,000 D.C. residents have activated the contact-tracing option on their smartphones since the city joined a new program last week.

The pace of residents joining the program, operated by Apple and Google, places D.C. among a group of cities that have most quickly embraced the technology, said city Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt. It comes as several states nationwide are recording a surge in coronavirus infections, while numbers in the greater Washington region have mostly held steady in recent days.

ROME — The team of city police officers had been assigned to look for coronavirus rule-breakers, so one evening last week, they parked their cars in the middle of one of Rome's liveliest neighborhoods and walked from one restaurant to the next.

In 90 minutes on patrol, they didn’t find a single violator.

What they found, instead, was nightlife that conformed to the rules but nonetheless posed risks for spreading the virus. Italy had imposed a mandate for mask-wearing outdoors — but it didn’t apply to the people eating at packed alfresco tables. The country had banned dining in groups of seven or more, but there were plenty of tables of four, five and six under mood lighting on the cobblestone streets.

TORONTO — Coronavirus case counts in much of Canada continue to climb, even in parts of the country that imposed restrictions this fall, and officials are pointing to Thanksgiving gatherings as one possible cause.

Canadian Thanksgiving, celebrated two weeks ago on the second Monday of October, might provide a cautionary tale for Americans. Officials advised Canadians to curtail their plans, including by celebrating only with others living under the same roof or moving the party online, but it is not clear whether everyone heeded that advice.

When touting his chief of staff Mark Meadows onstage in North Carolina this month, President Trump gave an unusual compliment for a risky move.

“He follows me,” Trump said of his helicopter ride to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after testing positive for the coronavirus. “I said, ‘You know what? I just tested positive.’ He didn’t care. He was in that helicopter.”

Meadows, after seven months on the job, has developed a close and durable relationship with Trump, who regularly calls his top aide eight or 10 times a day, according to current and former administration officials. He has largely avoided the will-he-won’t-he-be-fired chatter that dominated the tenures of his three predecessors.

A government-run clinical trial of Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody treatment against covid-19 will stop recruiting new patients due to “a low likelihood that the intervention would be of clinical value in this hospitalized patient population,” according to a statement from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The trial was paused Oct. 13, and the data and safety monitoring board met Monday and decided the trial should not continue because the drug, bamlanivimab, was unlikely to help patients. Although there were initial indications that there may be a possible safety issue, the updated data analyzed Monday did not find one.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows confirmed Sunday that he sought to keep the public from finding out that at least five members of Vice President Pence’s staff have tested positive for the coronavirus just over a week before the election.

“Well, obviously, yes,” Meadows said on CNN. “Sharing personal information is not something that we should do, not something that we do actually do — unless it’s the vice president or the president or someone that’s very close to them where there’s people in harm’s way.”