Update, Sept. 7, 2023 at 1:45 PM:
Whoopi Goldberg sent a video to “The View” to prove she didn’t die suddenly.
Goldberg missed Tuesday’s season premiere of “The View” after she tested positive for COVID for the third time.
She recorded the video in her bedroom at home after rumors spread online that she had passed away.
Goldberg sounded weak and she looked exhausted and frail in the video.
“In spite of everything you’ve heard, and let me just make sure you all know that it’s actually me,” she said before pulling her face mask down. “See it’s me. Ah, I am not at Burning Man, I am not still in Italy, I am not trying to change the outcome of the election… I just have COVID,” the EGOT winner laughed.
Goldberg said she’s still testing positive for Covid-19, the virus that causes long COVID in people who are vaccinated or were infected with COVID previously.
The Oscar-winning actress said she has to test negative before she can return to The View. “It might be a couple of days,” she added.
“You girls look great,” Goldberg told her co-hosts. “I can’t wait to get back and hang out. But until then it’s me and my mask.”
Goldberg said that her family quarantined her in her bedroom.
“I’m sort of confined to my room. I’ve never been sent to my room like this at this age,” she said.
Long COVID or post-COVID is a debilitating long-term illness that affects people with compromised immunity.
The 67-year-old actress, who is double-vaccinated and boosted, also took time off when she tested positive for COVID in January and November 2022.
Co-host Joy Behar told the studio audience on Tuesday, “As you can see Whoopi is not here, she has COVID, but she’s on the mend.”
Behar added that Goldberg is “on the tail end” of her illness. “Yes. It’s back, its back,” she said, referring to the pandemic that crippled the U.S. in 2020.
On August 28, Whoopi’s daughter Alex Martin and her three children attended the Bella Flora Celebrity Golf Tournament in Laguna Beach, California. They were there to represent Whoopi in support of her Cannabis Cactus magazine cover.
Whoopi hasn’t been seen in public since July 30. Her last Instagram post was on July 27.
Viewers asked, “Why isn’t The View on the air?” when the daytime talk show didn’t return with new episodes on August 9.
ABC ran reruns of The View from August 4 until the show returned on Sept. 5.
