WATCH: White House Reporters Sanitize Their Seats Ahead of Coronavirus Briefing

When a live stream is posted ahead of a briefing, there’s always a period of time when the cameras are on but nothing is happening before everything gets underway. Usually in those minutes of downtime you see reporters milling about a crowded briefing room, talking to one another, using their phones, or doing stand-ups for their networks.

In a sign of the times, the socially distanced briefing room had a different feeling ahead of Saturday’s Covid-19 task force update.

The decidedly not crowded room was pretty quiet, as reporters busily sanitized, sterilized, and generally de-germed their assigned seats. Or as Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher referred to it on Twitter, they were on “cootie patrol.”

White House reporters on cootie patrol before #Coronavirus briefing pic.twitter.com/ebmeZiAuEY

— Tommy X-TrumpIsARacist-opher (@tommyxtopher) March 21, 2020

No matter where you look, you cannot help but see the changes big and small brought on by the pandemic and our response to it.

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