The White House apparently isn't doing much contact tracing amid growing COVID-19 outbreak

President Trump returned to the White House from a military hospital on Monday evening, mask-less and still contagious with COVID-19, but the White House had changed in his three-day absence. "Instead of a bustling hive of pre-election activity, the West Wing has become a breeding ground for viral contagion," CNN reports. "A new aura of mistrust was settling in as several aides raised questions about whether they had been recklessly put in harm's way over the past week."

The White House won't say how many staffers have tested positive for COVID-19, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Sunday, citing unexplained "privacy concerns." McEnany said Monday that she had become the latest Trump aide to test positive. Yet "despite almost daily disclosures of new coronavirus infections among President Trump's close associates, the White House is making little effort to investigate the scope and source of its outbreak," The New York Times reports.

Given the timing of Trump's illness, medical experts say it's highly likely that he and at least seven others became infected at a Sept. 26 reception for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, either at the Rose Garden announcement or subsequent indoor gatherings. The White House has decided not to trace the contacts of the gathered guests and staff, even though it was likely a "superpreader" event, the Times reports. The Washington Post, at least, took a close look at possible spread at the ceremony.

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The White House has "cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has the government's most extensive knowledge and resources for contact tracing, out of the process," the Times reports, instead charging the small White House Medical Unit with emailing people potentially exposed in the 48 hours before Trump was diagnosed on Thursday.

"I guess an email is notification of exposure," Erin Sanders, a nurse practitioner and certified contact tracer in Boston, told the Times. "But that is not contact tracing," and it's "not how a responsible public health agency handles a super-spreading cluster of a deadly virus." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow was gobsmacked the White House isn't tracing people who were in contact with Trump.

"This is a cluster. What you want to do when there's a cluster is identify everyone who may have been exposed, so that they can be quarantined if appropriate, and tested," former CDC Director Tom Frieden agreed. "And by doing that you stop webs of transmission."