Around 4 p.m. on Monday, a troubling email landed in the inboxes of White House reporters. “We have been informed that one of our colleagues has a suspected case of COVID-19,” members of the White House Correspondents’ Association were informed. “The individual was at the White House on March 9, 11, 16 and 18. We encourage all journalists who were at the White House during this time period to review public health guidance, consult their medical professionals and take the appropriate next steps.”

Until recently, the briefing room had more or less become obsolete, given the elimination of the press secretary’s daily gab sessions with the Fourth Estate under Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Stephanie Grisham. Now the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room back to life, as President Trump and members of his coronavirus task force give updates on the latest developments in their handling of the crisis. It’s a dangerous irony: White House correspondents finally have a reason to be back in their designated seats, only to risk exposing themselves to a potentially deadly disease. As Yahoo News White House correspondent Hunter Walker tweeted Monday, “The lack of any real safety measures in the briefing room has been unnecessarily reckless. It was a matter of time before something like this happened.”

Some major news organizations, like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNBC, have stopped regularly sending reporters due to COVID-19 fears. “Since early March, we’ve made clear that no staff should feel obligated to attend these briefings, and we’ve been relying on the live TV coverage,” a Times spokesperson said. ABC News chief Washington correspondent and WHCA president Jonathan Karl said “there are still more organizations that want to cover the briefings than we have available seats for,” and so other outlets are being rotated in for those skipping. The briefing room already scaled back last week, with 25 reporters occupying its 49 seats. The social distancing accelerated Monday, with only 14 reporters getting seats. “We fully understand why some news organizations are no longer sending reporters because of obvious concerns about their health,” Karl added.

The COVID-19 briefings themselves have become a grim Trumpian sideshow to the catastrophic public health emergency that is sweeping the globe, and intensifying in the United States as new cases and deaths mount by the hour. Media organizations are grappling with how to cover them, given both their factually challenged content and the notion that they are, in some sense, not unlike Trump campaign events, a replacement while his rallies are on pause. Over the past week and a half, during these televised press conferences meant to inform and reassure the public, Trump has misstated the availability of testing, embellished the use of an antiviral drug, rated his waffling pandemic response a “10,” made a seemingly glib remark about Mitt Romney being in self-quarantine, bashed the media at large, and lashed out at an NBC News reporter simply for asking what the president would say to Americans who are scared.

“President Trump is using his daily briefings as a substitute for the campaign rallies that have been forced into extinction by the spread of the novel coronavirus,” wrote Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan. “These White House sessions—ostensibly meant to give the public critical and truthful information about this frightening crisis—are in fact working against that end. Rather, they have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members.”