Whoopi Goldberg Returns to The View as Virtual Shows Continue

It was a day of good and bad news for The View. Despite Joy Behar's promises to the contrary, the ABC daytime staple kicked off its second week of remote broadcasts this morning with a show that saw the return of Whoopi Goldberg, who tested positive for COVID-19 in December, and Sara Haines. However, just as the band was finally ready to get back together, Whoopi announced that Behar would be absent from Monday's show. Has anyone had a worse start to 2022 than the women of The View?

After spending the past few weeks in isolation, Whoopi seemed overjoyed to be returning to the table Monday morning, virtual though it may be. "Joy is not here today, but Sara is back on the show, and clearly, so am I," she said at the top of the hour. "I think this is me. I'm pretty sure it's me."

Whoopi then gave Haines a chance to explain her COVID situation, which involved coming into close contact with a positive case, but never actually getting sick from the virus. "I kind of got forced vacation time," she said, adding that she "Marie Kondo'd the place up" by organizing closets and redecorating her home. "I was going stir crazy, though. I'm really excited to be back."

But Whoopi and Haines aren't The View's only co-hosts affected by the Omicron variant. On Friday, Ana Navarro announced that she, too, had tested positive for COVID-19 and planned to appear on the show from her isolation area. Navarro said that she spent the weekend reading and watching TV, and she took a few minutes to thank the scientists and researchers who developed the vaccine. "It's really important that we emphasize that, Sunny, you and I have had COVID, but we were also vaccinated and boostered, and so that allowed us to have very mild symptoms," said the guest co-host. "On my fifth day of isolation, right now I'm feeling incredibly grateful ... get vaccinated!"

No one agreed with this sentiment more than Whoopi, who joked that because Omicron is "everywhere — it's like a fart in a dust storm," viewers must get vaccinated to protect themselves. "I got vaccinated, we all did it. We've all been vaccinated, we've all gotten the booster. I don't know how much more we could do to prevent this from happening," she said. "But we can say, we're looking at what the CDC is saying and basically, they're saying there's a lot of people who are not vaccinated who are in the hospital right now. That's just a fact."

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.