At a news conference on Saturday, President Trump announced that he had been tested for the coronavirus on Friday night and was awaiting the results, and Vice President Mike Pence announced that the extension of the administration’s European travel ban to the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Whether the president would be tested had been a matter of speculation since it first emerged that a member of a Brazilian delegation that visited Mar-a-Lago had tested positive. Two other people who were with the president at Mar-a-Lago have tested positive, and various members of Congress have been self-isolating after interacting with some of the same people.
Mr. Trump, wearing a “USA” baseball cap, said he decided to be tested for the coronavirus after his news conference on Friday to declare a national emergency.
“People were asking, did I take the test,” he said.
Asked when he expected to have the result, Mr. Trump said, “A day, two days.”
“They send it to a lab,” he said.
It was unclear if Mr. Pence, who interacted with some of the infected Mar-a-Lago visitors, had known that the president was tested. Answering a reporter’s question about his own status, Mr. Pence said, “I’m going to speak immediately after this press conference with the White House physician’s office,” which he said had previously advised him that neither he nor his wife needed to be tested.
The White House has begun checking the temperatures of anyone in close contact with Mr. Trump or Mr. Pence. White House staff checked the temperatures of everyone arriving at the news conference.
Reporters pressed Mr. Trump about “mixed messages,” asking about why he shook hands with a row of chief executives who attended his news conference on Friday where he announced a national emergency.
“It almost becomes a habit and you get out of that habit,” he said, noting that “getting away from shaking hands is a good thing.”
Mr. Pence said that, effective at midnight Monday night, the federal government’s European travel ban would apply to the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. health official, said that Mr. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on Friday had cleared the way for a concerted, effective response to the virus. “Now it’s all systems go,” he said, adding that “as we get knowledge about new testing, we’ll alleviate the anxiety that we have in the world about, we don’t know what’s going on, but also it will give the individual physician and individual citizen the opportunity to know where they stand.”
Later in the news conference, the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, called for unity in responding to the virus’s spread in the United States, urging “no more finger-pointing or criticism” and suggesting “less stories looking at what happened in the past.”
