Cardi B Donates 20,000 Meal Supplements to New York Medical Staff

Rapper Cardi B helped out her hometown during the coronavirus pandemic, donating 20,000 bottles of OWYN, a plant-based vegan, meal supplement drink, to New York City hospitals for their medical staff and crews. The supplement will help the crews who are working so much they rarely get a chance to have a full meal break during their shifts. The "Bodak Yellow" rapper is one of the many celebrities helping the fight against COVID-19, which has taken the lives of more than 6,000 people in the U.S.

Cardi's representative told TMZ the Manhattan-born performer wanted to help the health care workers who are doing so much they cannot take breaks for full meals. OWYN drinks are 100% plant-based, and have no dairy, soy, egg, peanut, gluten, tree nut, fish or shellfish ingredients. Cardi was one of the first celebrities to take the virus seriously, when she told fans back on March 10 to take it seriously. Brooklyn DJ iMarkkeyz even did a remix of her rant, which landed on Billboard charts.

"I been telling y'all though that this s— was real," Cardi said in an Instagram video that has now been seen more than 28.5 million times. "That video that went f— super-viral, I told y'all, 'Coronavirus! It's getting real!' I told y'all it was gonna get real! I know I said it in a funny way, but I knew it was gonna get real!"

Cardi herself recently went through a health crisis, although she did not have COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus. During an Isntagram Live video on Thursday, Cardi told her fans she quickly lost six pounds after "throwing up my f— life away." She said she was eating cotton candy and peanut butter to try and gain the weight back. Unfortunately, she was briefly hospitalized for stomach issues, reports Billboard.

"Yesterday, I was on Twitter, right, and one of my fans asked me, 'Oh, why you haven't gone on live?' And I told her like, 'Yo, I went to the hospital b—. I was sick,'" Cardi said. "And then today my publicist hit me up like, 'Oh, I just wanted to tell you like ain't nothing coronavirus-related or something.' Thank God."

On Friday morning, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state had its deadliest single day from the coronavirus, with more than 500 deaths reported. The death toll climbed from 2,373 to 2,935 in just the past 24 hours, reports NPR. He also signed an executive order allowing the state to redistribute ventilators to hospitals in need. The National Guard will be used to move the ventilators to where they are needed.

"Supplies, [personal protective equipment] are in short supply as they are across the country," Cuomo said. "We need companies to make the materials. It is unbelievable to me that in New York state, in the United States of America, we can't make these materials. And that we are all shopping China to try to get these materials and we're all competing against each other... The curve continues to go up."

New York state is the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, with over 14,800 people hospitalized. Cuomo said there was some "good news" though, as 8,886 coronavirus patients have been discharged from hospitals.

There are more than 266,000 coronavirus cases confirmed in the U.S. and more than 6,900 reported deaths.

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