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NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang said he tested positive for COVID-19.
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“I am experiencing mild symptoms, but am otherwise feeling well,” he said in a statement.
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“I will quarantine in accordance with public health guidelines,” Yang added.
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Andrew Yang, a former 2020 presidential candidate, said in a statement on Tuesday that he tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
“After testing negative as recently as this weekend, today I took a COVID rapid test and received a positive result,” he tweeted. “I’m experiencing mild symptoms, but am otherwise feeling well & in good spirits. I’m quarantining & adhering to public health guidelines until I can get back out on the campaign trail.”
Yang is currently running in the New York City mayoral race to defeat incumbent Bill de Blasio. He formally announced his candidacy in a video released January 13.
“New York City always felt like the center of the universe,” Yang said. “I grew up an hour north and came into the city with my brother whenever I could.”
The former presidential candidate went on to highlight one of the central pillars of his 2020 campaign, a call for universal basic income, and said the state of New York City in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic “breaks my heart.”
Yang has made UBI a key part of his mayoral campaign, too; according to his website, he wants to introduce “the largest basic income program in the country” and also wants to implement annual $2,000 direct payments to families living in “extreme poverty.”
“The pandemic has been most devastating to the most vulnerable New Yorkers,” the website said. “This means we must tackle poverty and homelessness in a meaningful way, and prevent more families from losing their homes as we face the largest eviction crisis this City has seen. We need to find ways to make the City affordable so that our people can thrive and live sustainably.”
Shortly before launching his campaign, Yang ignited some controversy when he discussed his family’s living situation in an interview with The New York Times.
“We live in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan,” Yang told The Times. “And so, like, can you imagine trying to have two kids on virtual school in a two-bedroom apartment, and then trying to do work yourself?”
His remarks drew some backlash from observers who pointed out that many New York families with kids are forced to work remotely in far more cramped apartments.
Yang explained his comments afterward in a statement to Insider.
“Over the last year I’ve spent my time just about evenly across NYC, where my kids and special needs son are enrolled in school, upstate, so my kids could spend more time outside in the depths of the first wave, and in Georgia, where I’m proud to have worked day and night to elect my friends Reverend Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate,” the statement said, referring to Georgia’s newly elected Democratic senators.
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Originally published