Invisible party crasher has the other Washington on edge

“What are you hearing about the Gridiron?”

A version of that text message blazed across Washington phones this week as the Gridiron Club dinner, an annual black-tie roast between journalists and presidential administrations held over the weekend, has quickly devolved from a swampy cross-pollination party into an event where a lot of boldface names appear to have caught the coronavirus.

On Wednesday, two Biden administration officials who attended the dinner, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, said they had tested positive for the virus. Neither was determined to be in close contact with President Joe Biden, defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as someone less than 6 feet away for more than 15 minutes over a 24-hour period.

The positive tests are a reminder that, even as officials seek to pivot away from strict restrictions and encourage Americans to learn to live with the coronavirus, the pandemic is not over, driven by the emergence of a new, highly contagious subvariant whose spread is alarming experts.