Whoopi Goldberg is once again absent from The View after testing positive for COVID.
Joy Behar, who fills in for Goldberg as moderator every Friday, began Thursday’s live show with a note about the Oscar-winning Ghost star’s health.
“You might have noticed Whoopi is not here, because Whoopi has tested positive for COVID,” the 81-year-old announced at the top of the program. “You know, it’s going around, still. So, you have to be careful!”
Legal expert and cohost Sunny Hostin added that Goldberg, 68, contracted the virus as part of “a summer surge,” speculating that a new booster shot for the coronavirus vaccine would be available later this year.
Goldberg’s latest bout with Covid appears to be her fourth. In September 2023, she addressed her third run-in with the coronavirus by sending a video message to the show. “In spite of everything you’ve heard,” she said in good spirits at the time, “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.”
COVID-19 cases are on the rise again across the country, according to waste data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said the country has traditionally seen increases in COVID every summer
“We had anticipated that there would be something of a summer bump because we have seen that in the past … COVID hangs around during the summer and even gets a little more active, unlike influenza, which virtually disappears during the summertime,” he told ABC News. “Now this bump will go down, and then, of course, we’ll get the conventional winter surge later.”