Country star Reba McEntire is urging everyone to “stay safe” following her battle with COVID-19.
This week, the Reba actress explained on a TikTok live stream that she and her boyfriend, Young Sheldon star Rex Linn, had tested positive for the virus despite being vaccinated.
“I just want to say one thing: this has been a hard year and it’s getting rougher again,” she said. “You guys, please stay safe. Wear your mask. Do what you have to do. Stay home.”
Though McEntire had planned to return to the stage later this year, she shared that it may not be in the cards due to the rapidly spreading delta variant, which is more contagious than the original strain of COVID-19. Across the United States, cases are rising once again, especially in low vaccination areas.
“Spikes are going everywhere right now … and it’s all over the country, this new variant,” McEntire explained. “We have plans right now to go back on tour in January, February and March. We have plans of being with Brooks & Dunn at Caesars in the first two weeks, almost three weeks of December, but we don’t know if that’s going to go.”
It was just in July that McEntire returned to the Grand Ole Opry for a packed show. Sharing a photo of the crowd, she wrote on Instagram at the time, “It was great to be back on stage at the @opry with a live audience for the #4thofjuly!”
While vaccines still provide the best protection against COVID-19, breakthrough cases do happen.
Dr. Esther Choo, professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, explained to Yahoo Finance, “There’s a lot of talk about how people are getting COVID anyway, even though they’re vaccinated, and that is true and that is expected because there’s no vaccine that’s 100% all the time. So we are seeing these breakthrough cases. Many of them are asymptomatic, totally without symptoms, and they’re getting tested as part of contact tracing or other screening so that they can go on to certain activities or they have very mild symptoms.”