MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle ‘sick and scared’ after she, husband and kids tested positive for COVID

MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle revealed Monday that she and her family are recovering from coronavirus after she spent the better part of the past two weeks in bed.

The mother of three, who is in quarantine at her New Jersey home, told viewers that she was “incredibly lucky” that her symptoms felt “just like a terrible flu” and that she was able to take time off from work to focus on her health.

“We still don’t know how we got it, but we are very, very lucky,” she said.

Ruhle also urged Americans to do more to stop the spread of the virus as the pandemic continues to shatter daily records across the U.S.

Stephanie Ruhle attends The Hollywood Reporter's annual Most Powerful People in Media cocktail reception at The Pool on Thursday, April 11, 2019, in New York. (Evan Agostini/)

“There’s so much more that I now know after having COVID myself,” she said. “Most importantly, we don’t have a vaccine today. We have a virus that is ravaging our country and we need to do a whole lot more to stop it.

“And as a person who is sick and scared, I am begging you, please take this seriously. It is not over.”

At least two experimental vaccines, developed by U.S. drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna, are expected to be distributed this month, but health officials have warned that it would likely take months until the shots are widely available to millions of Americans.

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned last week that this winter could be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”

The warning comes at a time of surging COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths across much of the country. The U.S. death toll, which remains the highest in the world, is approaching 283,000.

“More than 2,000 of them died just yesterday,” Ruhle said on her show Monday.

The 44-year-old journalist also wrote a personal essay detailing her experience and condemning the government’s disastrous and confusing response to the pandemic.

Ruhle said her husband first learned he was infected after getting a rapid test the day before Thanksgiving. She said he immediately went back to their New York City apartment while she stayed in New Jersey with her kids — ages 7, 11 and 14.

“Had we not gotten my husband tested, we would have kept our kids in school, exposing our family, our kids’ classmates and our colleagues,” she wrote. “We were a day away from unknowingly becoming superspreaders. That absolutely terrifies me.”

Ruhle said her family had a series of challenges along the way. Her urgent care test never came back, her husband’s first PCR test was never processed and almost none of the businesses she called to alert them about her diagnosis wanted to hear it.

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But the morning news anchor feels like she still had a much better experience than many Americans.

“My family is extremely lucky,” she said. “We didn’t get super sick. We had access to testing, eventually got some results and had the space and the financial stability to isolate safely. We have supportive paying jobs and schools that can offer virtual learning. If I didn’t have all of that, maybe it would have been a lot harder to follow the guidelines.”

Ruhle’s diagnosis comes days after fellow MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow revealed that her longtime partner, Susan Mikula, had been battling serious coronavirus symptoms.