One of the oldest US senators in the upper house announced Tuesday, November 17, that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, while the country has been experiencing a conflagration of new contaminations for several weeks.
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"
I tested positive for the coronavirus,
" Chuck Grassley, who at 87, is the second oldest elected to the Senate, posted on Twitter.
Elected pro tempore president of the Senate, he is third in the order of succession in case of incapacity of the president, after the vice-president, Mike Pence, and the Democratic president of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.
The Republican senator from Iowa clarified that he was feeling well and had for the moment "
no symptoms
" but that he was going into quarantine in accordance with the recommendations of the doctors and those of the American Centers of fight against the diseases.
Because of this sanitary isolation, Grassley, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1974 and then to the Senate in 1980, missed a voting session on Tuesday, the first in 27 years.
The last time he was prevented from voting was in 1993, the senator holding one of the highest attendance records in the Senate, with 8,927 consecutive votes in session to his credit.
Other members of the upper house have recently tested positive for Covid-19, including the dean of Congress, Republican Don Young or been exposed to the virus, such as Florida Senator Rick Scott, who is also doing a quarantine.
By far the country most bereaved by the pandemic with 248,000 dead, the United States has experienced a surge in the number of infections since the end of October, particularly in the north of the country and the Midwest.
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