The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg may not have been in the studio Wednesday, but that didn’t stop her from tackling her hosting duties. The actress and television personality co-hosted the daytime talk show remotely from her home in New Jersey.
Taking extra precautions after a severe battle with pneumonia last year, Goldberg assured viewers and the other View co-hosts that she’d been given the “all clear” by a doctor.
Goldberg explained that “all the inconsistency” between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had left her feeling a bit uncertain, so she felt that it was important to take additional precautions.
“I’m great. This is what we call responsible social distancing,” she said. “I am healthy. My doctor was very annoyed with me. He said, ‘I just gave you the okay, why are you back?’ I said, ‘Because I need an okay okay.’ So he gave me the okay okay but I just felt like, with all the inconsistency between the governor and the mayor, it wasn’t good for me.”
“[There’s the] mayor who’s saying, ‘We’re going to be in place for now, New York’s going to get locked down.’ And then you have Gov. Cuomo who’s saying, ‘Well, that’s not going to happen.’ I just felt like, if I was going to really try to figure out whether it was okay to come in, my brain said, ‘You know what, until they can get themselves together — the governor and the mayor — until they can figure out what they’re doing, I should not go in.’ So that’s why I am still here.”
People reports that her fellow co-host, Joy Behar, also plans to stay home amid the coronavirus outbreak. Behar said that due to being high risk, her daughter has urged her to self-quarantine.
“I’m in a higher-risk group because of my age, but I’m perfectly healthy,” Behar said. “The staff here, the exec producers, everybody, has really been doing their due diligence to clean the place up. But I’ve been thinking, maybe at my age — I know I look good, I look fantastic — I don’t look my age, I don’t. And so you really can’t tell how old I am by looking at me, but I am up there. The number, it makes me dizzy!”
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