We're tracing the White House coronavirus outbreak on Claudia Conway's TikTok now
The circle of people infected with coronavirus with ties to the White House keeps growing. Late Friday, former aide Kellyanne Conway confirmed her positive diagnosis. A couple days later, her daughter, Claudia Conway, indicated she’d caught the virus from her mother. These coronavirus cases weren’t reported by official sources, however. Claudia broke the news on TikTok.
Here’s the coronavirus timeline for the Conway household: last Saturday, Kellyanne sat directly behind first lady Melania Trump at the Rose Garden press conference announcing the president’s Supreme Court pick, Amy Coney Barrett, in a largely maskless, shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. Trump revealed his coronavirus diagnosis late Thursday. Then Claudia posted a TikTok saying her mom was “coughing all around the house,” soundtracked to Cardi B saying, “That’s suspicious.”
Claudia broke the news her mom had coronavirus on Friday night, in a video of herself wearing a mask captioned: “bye i’m done i’ll see you all in two weeks.” Kellyanne then confirmed via Twitter she “tested positive for COVID-19” and said her symptoms were “mild (light cough).” Per Vulture, after Kellyanne’s announcement, 15-year-old Claudia livestreamed that she hadn’t been tested yet but would be the next day and was “pretty sure” she had the virus. Sure enough, she confirmed her own diagnosis on Sunday night in a TikTok filmed from the tub, captioned: “currently dying from COVID.”
Claudia’s self-reported symptoms seem to be more severe than her mother’s. In a pre-diagnosis TikTok, she complained her lungs hurt and it was difficult for her to breathe. The teen appended a comment to her bathtub post that reads: “my mom has no symptoms yet I literally feel like HELL.”
Claudia has publicly sparred with her mother, a longtime Trump confidante, on social media all summer. Kellyanne attending the Rose Garden event, which is being dubbed a “super-spreader event,” then bringing the virus home to infect her family adds fuel to Claudia’s anger. “I’m furious,” the 15-year-old wrote on TikTok right after telling the world about her mother’s diagnosis. In a comment on the same post she added, “she also lied to me today and said her test was negative when it literally wasn’t and I spent all day around her.”
Lots of families across America unfortunately already know how scary and devastating it can be for their household to contract coronavirus. The ripples of disease through the Conway family are just playing out in the public eye, since the world’s attention is focused on contagion in the White House. The administration hasn’t mobilized a CDC contact tracing team to follow-up with people exposed to Trump, so there’s no telling how far the infection has spread at this point, however. And frighteningly, the social media dispatches of a teenager served as one of the clearest sources of intel this weekend about who has COVID and how they’re connected to the president.
