Doja Cat has tested positive for coronavirus. Image by Getty

By Irene Katz Connelly July 27, 2020

Rapper, songwriter, and perennial generator of internet controversy Doja Cat has tested positive for coronavirus — after downplaying the risks of the pandemic to her millions of Instagram followers.

In an interview with UK radio station Capital Xtra, Doja Cat said she was one of America’s four million confirmed cases of the virus. “I got COVID,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t know how this happens, but I guess I ordered something off of Postmates and I don’t know how I got it, but I got it.”

She added that her “four-day symptom freakout” is over, and she’s on the mend.

In March, as coronavirus arrived in the United States, Doja Cat dismissed growing concern about the pandemic in a now-infamous session on Instagram Live, comparing it to an ordinary flu and telling fans to “just take some Mucinex and drink water and tea and sleep.”

“Y’all are so scared of corona that I need a Corona,” she joked.

It’s important to remember that Doja Cat made her comments in March, when, despite consistent reporting on the virus’s toll in China, many Americans had yet to grasp its ramifications. In those halcyon days, while blithely traversing the city in various airless forms of public transit, the Schmooze overhead versions of that corona/Corona joke countless times.

So to everyone tweeting about Doja Cat today, we say: Let she who never wishfully compared coronavirus to the flu in early March throw the first stone.

Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at [email protected].

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