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View Winners → Health Nov 03, 2021
| Photo courtesy of the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is fully vaccinated, tested positive for COVID-19 Wednesday while in Glasgow, Scotland, for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The mayor is attending the conference with about seven staff members, all of whom tested negative.
“Mayor Garcetti tested positive for COVID-19 earlier today. He is feeling good and isolating in his hotel room,” according to an announcement on the mayor’s Twitter account.
In accordance with the UN’s guidelines for the conference, Garcetti conducted self-administered nasal swab tests frequently throughout the trip and tested negative, including receiving negative results twice on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the mayor and his staff took PCR tests to get back into the United States, and Garcetti’s positive test result was received on Wednesday.
The mayor’s team was figuring out what will happen next as Garcetti isolates in Glasgow. Garcetti had been scheduled to return to the United States on Thursday.
Garcetti’s scheduled attendance at a Wednesday New York Times panel discussion on urban challenges and solutions to combating the climate crisis was canceled.
In a midday interview with ABC7, Garcetti said, “I’m feeling great, which means I think either I got a false-positive at best, or at worst, as a doubly-vaccinated person, symptoms are extremely mild.”
“So I’m very hopeful,” the mayor said from his Scotland hotel room. “Grateful for all the messages folks have sent to me. But I’m feeling good. We got a lot of work done. I was about to get ready to get on the plane tomorrow morning to come back to L.A., but we’re following all the protocols and procedures here in Scotland when you test positive in a PCR test, so this could be my room for a few days.”
Garcetti told the station if his test is confirmed to be positive, he will have to isolate for 10 days. He said he received the Moderna vaccine, and is planning to receive a booster shot “as soon as I’m out of the woods with this.”
“But it’s a real reminder that when you let your guard down, even when you follow everything right the way we’ve been doing — masked up here, making sure you follow the protocols — when you mix with folks, you should wash your hands, make sure you wear your mask, you should do everything,” he said. “And there’s still a chance of breakthroughs, which is why the vaccine is so important. Without that you could land up in the hospital and you have an 11 times more likely chance to die if you’re not vaccinated when you get one of these cases that’s going around right now.”
Garcetti told Channel 7 he plans to keep working during isolation, although he will “have to adjust my sleeping to do so.”
“I have no plans to kick back,” he said. “I think my Netflix queue will stay just as long as it is today.”
On Monday, the mayor announced in front of heads of state that C40 Cities, a climate coalition of 97 cities — which Garcetti chairs — received pledges from more than 1,000 cities and local governments to join the coalition’s Race to Zero.
The mayor has spent the last couple of days with the C40 delegation, which includes mayors from 12 international cities within the coalition, including mayors of Athens, Phoenix, Paris, North Dhaka, Oslo, Freetown, Stockholm and Seattle.
Garcetti and the rest of the delegation took a 4.5-hour train ride together from London’s Euston Station to Glasgow’s Central Station on Monday.
In Glasgow, Garcetti was in close contact with London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who was named to succeed Garcetti as chair of C40 Cities, as well as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is serving as UN Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions and Global Ambassador for the Race to Zero and Race To Resilience campaigns.
