Kim Kardashian says her COVID diagnosis was unrelated to private island birthday party

Kim Kardashian would like to clarify that while she and her kids caught COVID-19 apparently after she threw a birthday party on a private island, the two events are unrelated.

The latest episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians revealed that Kardashian and her kids contracted COVID-19 last year, and BuzzFeed News subsequently reported that she seems to have tested positive "roughly 10 days after returning home" from a controversial trip to a private island for a birthday party in October. Kardashian drew criticism after posting pictures of herself celebrating her birthday on the island while the pandemic was still raging. At the time, she said the trip was taken "after two weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine."

Kardashian responded directly to BuzzFeed's article on Twitter, calling any suggestion that she got COVID-19 from the island party "false."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"Nobody caught COVID from the trip," she said.

Instead, Kardashian said that her son Saint was "the first to have it in our family and he caught it from school from another student who tested positive first." She says she then "developed symptoms and got it a few days after he coughed on me while caring for him." While BuzzFeed didn't explicitly say that Kardashian definitely got COVID-19 from the trip, it speculated that the backlash over it may have at least been the reason her diagnosis wasn't publicly disclosed at the time.

Kardashian described during the episode that when she got COVID-19, she felt "so awful" that she could "hardly even get out of bed." It may not help avoid perceptions of a link between the diagnosis and the party, though, that the episode's highlight reel on YouTube cuts from footage of the island party right to a title card reading "KIM & THE KIDS GET COVID-19."