Kathy Griffin Diagnosed With Abdominal Infection; Criticizes ‘Hospital Set-up’ and CDC Testing Guidelines

The Kathy Griffin saga appears to have finally ended. She spoke with a reporter from the LA Times who released an article yesterday. The article states that she has an abdominal infection that is being treated with medication. She apparently got a chest X-ray that showed clear lungs and an abdominal CT scan that revealed the infection. Supposedly her temperature was around normal, but she had nausea and diarrhea, along with severe chills and a sore throat.

Griffin says that the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center hospital set-up was not ideal. “Frankly, when they said the corona ward, I thought I would be walking into the white suits with blue-taped ceilings, everything,” she says. “I kind of expected them to put me in a shower room and all that — but as recently as [Tuesday], there’s no cavalry that’s coming in handing out millions of [test] swabs.”

She claimed that the doctor there wanted to test her, but because of CDC guidelines, he could not. “The doctor was going through the boxes and going through the boxes [on a form] and she kept saying, like, ‘Ugh, because of the lungs, the fever and the kind of cough … you don’t meet the CDC requirements,’” Griffin said. “I just don’t have an answer. I don’t know,” she said. “Someone at Cedars said to me, we cannot give you this test because of the CDC guidelines. I’m suggesting that the guidelines are still too strict because they don’t have enough tests.”

She was given the option to be admitted to the hospital, where she might be more likely to get tested, but after consulting with a few health-care staffers decided she’d be better off self-isolating at home.

The writer of the article, Christie D’Zurilla, made many odd claims, starting at the very beginning where she says, “Kathy Griffin might have been exposed to the coronavirus. Or she might not have.” She also claims that “the public likely wouldn’t have known about her illness at all had President Trump not tweeted a claim Wednesday that the U.S. had outpaced South Korea in COVID-19 testing.”

In a nod to another story we had written about this saga, D’Zurilla claims that Griffin is a “celebrity” who might be able to “buy a test”. “So much for those stories about celebrities being able to buy a coronavirus test whenever they want one.”

Ultimately, the article went on far longer than it should have and was very disjointed, hard to follow, and way too much information for a situation that really wasn’t necessary in the first place.