U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken scrapped the rest of his tour of Southeast Asia and will return to Washington after a member of the press traveling with him tested positive for COVID-19, State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
The changes mean Blinken will skip planned visits to Thailand, where he was to meet Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai, and to Hawaii, where he was scheduled to meet with with U.S. Indo-Pacific forces.
Blinken and other senior staff have tested negative for COVID, Price said, and the person who tested positive didn’t participate in Blinken’s events Wednesday in Kuala Lumpur, the U.S. embassy in Malaysia said in a statement.
“We learned this morning, through our routine PCR testing, that a member of our traveling press pool tested positive for COVID-19 upon arrival in Kuala Lumpur,” Price said. “The individual had last tested negative in Jakarta, our previous stop.”
Price said the decision to abbreviate the trip had been made “out of an abundance of caution.”
In addition to Blinken, all other senior staff also tested negative upon arrival in Kuala Lumpur, Price said.
The person who tested positive would remain in isolation, Price said.
In addition to Malaysia, Blinken has visited the U.K. and Indonesia on his latest trip abroad. Earlier Wednesday, he said the U.S. is exploring ways to pressure Myanmar’s ruling junta, as civilian strife escalates in the Southeast Asian country.
“It’s important in weeks and months ahead to look at what steps we can take to pressure the regime, to put the country back on a democratic trajectory,” Blinken said in a joint press appearance with Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah.
The junta ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a coup in February, sparking clashes between her supporters and the army. She was found guilty last week by a court for inciting dissent against the military and sentenced to two years in prison.
Blinken also said that the U.S. is “actively looking” at whether the Myanmar government’s actions toward the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority should be labeled “genocide.” A 2018 United Nations report said Myanmar’s top generals should be investigated and prosecuted for committing genocide and war crimes against the minority population.
