CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo Reveals He’s Lost 13 Pounds Over 3 Days Following Coronavirus Diagnosis

Chris Cuomo is sharing his firsthand experience with COVID-19 after the CNN anchor announced he had tested positive for coronavirus Tuesday. Giving an update on his condition during a CNN Global Town Hall Thursday, Cuomo revealed that despite having relatively mild symptoms of the pandemic disease, he has already dropped 13 lbs. amid what he described as a grueling few days.

“I’m a big guy — I started off at 230 pounds,” Cuomo said. “My wife is feeding me like we’re still in the dating phase. So it’s not like I’m hurting for nutrition. I’m eating and drinking constantly. I’m just sweating it out and it’s the sickness.” Cuomo, who is self-isolating in his basement away from his family, added he wasn’t sharing his experience to scare people, but to give a realistic depiction of what a positive diagnosis can look like: “The idea that it’s easy, so you can be nonchalant, that’s so misleading,” he said.

Other off-putting symptoms have been vivid hallucinations of his dead father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo and that he had chipped his own tooth from them chattering so hard amid fevers.

“I’m doing well. The beast comes at night,” he told Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta during Thursday’s show. “As we know the health care workers have taken to call the virus ‘the beast.’ I understand why. My fever has gone up a couple of degrees in like the last 30 minutes. Nights are tough, and I’ve learned something that I didn’t know before: It is responsible journalism to say that 80 percent of people who get this, statistically, wind up okay, meaning they don’t get a hospital, they get through it. It is not humanly responsible, though, from an ethical perspective. Now that I am one of the anointed and these people reach out to me — you SUFFER when you have this at home, unless you are ridiculously lucky, statistically, and maybe karmically as well.”

During the few “good hours” he has, Cuomo said he’s trying to advocate for adequate testing materials for the state of New York, of which his brother, Andrew Cuomo, is governor.

“When I do have a couple of good hours, I’m still trying to do help with procurement for the state [of New York] because they really are fighting state by state, which is so stupid, to get the equipment that they need,” Cuomo said. “So, I don’t know how I got it and most people don’t, Anderson, and we are so far behind on testing. We’re telling ourselves these lies about testing. We’re nowhere near where we need to be.”

Photo credit: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM