Claire Byrne has admitted she broke down in tears when she tested positive for Covid-19.
The presenter contracted the deadly virus back in March, just weeks after Ireland went into lockdown.
Speaking to the RTÉ Guide, Claire said she cried when she received her diagnosis – because she was “terrified” she had passed the virus on to her parents, Tom and Breda.
Claire recalled: “I got my result late on a Friday and rang them straight away. I was terrified because I had seen them on the Thursday before I got my symptoms.”
“So once I digested the news, I spoke with my mother and she did the motherly thing of worrying for me: ‘Oh don’t worry about us! We’re fine’.
“It was only when we were 14 days out from when I had seen them that I stopped worrying.”
“Of course, that was in March, when if you contracted the virus you thought you were either going to get seriously ill or you would die,” she explained.
Back in August, Claire told Goss.ie that it took her “months” to recover from Covid-19.
She said: “I had fatigue for quite a long time. I felt very fluey and I had respiratory symptoms like congestion and so on. Not for weeks, but for a couple of months.”
“I think a lot of people who have had the virus have said ‘this is not something that you want to get’ – of course it isn’t.”
“It’s good to make people aware that it’s not a simple condition that you get over in 10 days or a week. It lingers. It certainly lingers,” she added.
