Senator Kelly Loeffler quarantining after inconclusive COVID-19 tests

4 min readNov 22, 2020

U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler is quarantining after receiving mixed results from recent coronavirus tests, a day after she campaigned with Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Senator David Perdue in the state’s hotly contested twin Senate races.

The Georgia Republican took two rapid COVID tests on Friday morning that came back negative, a spokesperson for her campaign said in a statement Saturday night.

She received another test Friday evening and the results came back positive, the statement said. Loeffler tested again Saturday morning and the results were inconclusive.

Her campaign says she doesn’t have symptoms. Loeffler is following CDC guidelines and informing those with whom she was in direct contact, the statement said.

Pence is awaiting more conclusive test results to see if he qualifies as having had “close contact” with Loeffler, his press secretary said Sunday.

“As he awaits a confirmatory test from Senator Loeffler, Vice President Pence is in regular consultation with the White House Medical Unit and will be following CDC guidelines as he has in other circumstances when he has been a close contact,” press secretary Devin O’Malley said.

Loeffler appeared at a campaign event with Pence and Perdue in Georgia on Friday. She has held several rallies in recent weeks with crowds packed into close quarters and many audience members not wearing masks.

Loeffler is facing Democrat Raphael Warnock in a January 5 runoff election — one of two races that will determine which party has control of the Senate.

The other race will feature Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff. Having won 50 Senate seats in the new Congress, Republicans need one more for control. A Democratic sweep of the Georgia runoffs would yield a 50–50 Senate, giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote to tilt the chamber to Democrats.

With a little over a month until the runoff election and all the candidates intensely campaigning, it wasn’t immediately clear what impact the tests would have on Loeffler’s ability to campaign. Warnock tweeted Saturday night that he was praying that her test results come back negative.

Two staff members for Loeffler tested positive for COVID-19 last month. At the time, a subsequent test for Loeffler came back negative, according to a statement from her office.

The Upstate continues to report more new cases than other areas of the state.

On Saturday, Greenville County reported the most new cases with 307, followed by Pickens County with 111 new cases, Spartanburg County with 93 new cases and Anderson County with 74.

“Men and women and children of South Carolina, we have plenty of tests out there for you, plenty of locations,” McMaster said. “So don’t wait. Go ahead and get tested before turkey, and you’ll be glad that you did.”

The chief adviser to the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed said Sunday that it is “unfortunate” that the COVID-19 vaccine “has been politicized.”

Moncef Slaoui during an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” attributed polls showing a decreased public willingness to be inoculated against COVID-19 to the process being “politicized.”

“I really think it’s very unfortunate that the whole process has been politicized and therefore the context has created conditions whereby people’s perception have been exacerbated, and we are where we are today,” he said.
Slaoui told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he thinks the American public has “misunderstood” the level of efficacy the Food and Drug Administration requires for a vaccine to be approved.

His comments come after Pfizer and its German partner company, BioNtech, applied for emergency authorization for their vaccine last week, which it expects to be 95 percent effective. Pfizer’s rival, Moderna, also is moving forward with a vaccine that preliminary analysis showed to be almost 95 percent effective.

Slaoui on Sunday said that the levels of efficacy of the vaccine candidates are “almost a full insurance against this pandemic.”

“I think and I hope that’s gonna change people’s perception,” he said.

Slaoui also said he expects enough Americans — 70 percent — will receive the vaccine to reach the necessary herd immunity in May.

“I really hope and look forward to seeing that the level of negative perception of the vaccine decreases, and people’s acceptance increases,” he said. “That’s going to be critical to help us. Most people need to be immunized before we can go back to a normal life.”

Senator Kelly Loeffler quarantining after inconclusive COVID-19 tests

Written by Sunday Football