Ruhle, also a senior business correspondent at NBC News, opened up about the diagnoses in an essay published on Monday. She also addressed her experience on air.
“To date, over 14.7 million have tested positive for the coronavirus,” Ruhle wrote. “You can now add me, my husband and our three children to that massive number.”
The number cited by Ruhle is reflected by Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus resource centre, which currently lists 14,793,047 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the US and 282,522 deaths.
Ruhle said her husband was the first to test positive for the illness, the day before Thanksgiving. His symptoms included “a headache and a minor sore throat”.
“My husband immediately went back to our New York City apartment to isolate,” she wrote. “I stayed in our New Jersey home with our three kids, who are 14, 11 and 7, and I self-quarantined in a guest room above our garage, separate from my kids. Just having this type of housing arrangement is a privilege.”
Despite those precautions, Ruhle tested positive too a few days later. Her symptoms, she said, “felt just like a terrible flu”.
The anchor pointed to several hurdles, such as difficulties getting tested and trouble with contact tracing calls.
“My family is extremely lucky. 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,” she added. “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.”
On the air, Ruhle urged viewers to take the pandemic seriously.
“We don’t have a vaccine today,” she said. “We have a virus that is ravaging our country, and we need to do a whole lot more to stop it.”
