Herman Cain, 74 years old and an official "surrogate" for US President Donald Trump in his 2020 re-election campaign, has tested positive for Covid-19, NBC News reports.
Cain attended Trump's Tulsa rally on June 20 and was diagnosed with the virus nine days later - of course it is impossible to know where he actually contracted it.
After testing positive, he developed symptoms "serious enough that he required hospitalization" but he is not on a ventilator.
Following the Tulsa rally, Cain wrote an op-ed defending the decision to let it go ahead: "The media worked very hard to scare people out of attending the Trump campaign rally last Saturday night in Tulsa ... Yes, there were some empty seats in the nosebleed sections, but 16,000 people in the Covid-19 era is pretty impressive," he wrote.