‘Live’: Kelly Ripa Says She & Crew Worked ‘Sick as Dogs’ Back in the Day

According to Kelly Ripa, Live With Kelly and Mark‘s workplace culture around taking sick days was different in the days before Mark Consuelos became her cohost.

“Anybody here, have you been sick? Did you get the flu? Anybody? Anybody here under the weather?” Ripa asked the show’s audience on Thursday, January 15. To her surprise, nobody in the crowd had recently been sick, but Consuelos said he’s “been thinking about it.”

He explained, “I’ll have a feeling, and I’m like, ‘Do I feel sick? Let me think about it. Nope.’ And I’m not sick.”

The flu conversation got Ripa thinking about her earlier days on Live. “You didn’t work here back in the day, but I did. and everybody else here did,” she told Consuelos before addressing crew members behind the camera. “Remember pre-COVID when we used to roll into work sick as dogs all the time? Like, it never occurred to any of us to take off.”

Ripa joked that she and the Live crew have “worked here with flu A, B, C, D, and every other letter that the flu came up with,” adding, “Every virus, pink eye, strep throat. And we’d be like, ‘I have strep throat,’ and everybody would touch each other’s things. One bug would wipe this place out, but we were still working.”

Over time, Ripa said the staff’s attitude about working while sick shifted. “Now, it’s like, ‘I have a sniffle. I don’t think I can come in today. What if it’s something terrible?’” she quipped. “It’s different now, how we work. I prefer it the new way. Better safe than sorry.”

ABC

Ripa has been on Live since she took over for Kathie Lee Gifford in 2001. She has cohosted the show with Regis Philbin, Michael Strahan, and Ryan Seacrest before Consuelos became her permanent cohost in 2023.

The pair are no strangers to being candid about their health on the ABC talk show. During a November 2025 episode of Live, Consuelos revealed that he had recently undergone a colonoscopy. “I’m 54, and I hadn’t had one yet, so that’s late,” he stated.

Consuelos said his colonoscopy results turned out “great,” adding, “I don’t have to do that again for 10 years.”

The following month, Ripa told Live viewers that she figured out why she and Consuelos “always get sick during the holidays.” She said, “It’s because our bodies know we can’t get sick, because we have to be here. I’m not kidding, as soon as it’s the holidays, like, Day 1, that’s when I come down with something.”

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Ripa joked that her body can tell when she’s not working, and will choose that time to get sick. “Right at the beginning of COVID, we had winter break here. And there was a second outbreak of COVID,” she recalled. “We tape our final show, and you [Michael Gelman] called me immediately, like, two hours later, and you go, ‘Just so you know, when we come back from winter break, we’re not coming back to the studio because there’s another outbreak of COVID and we’re closing down the building again.’”

During the break, Consuelos and the couple’s three kids — Michael, 28, Lola, 24, and Joaquin, 22 — all fell ill with COVID. “Andy Cohen calls me, and he goes, ‘Just bite the bullet, and get COVID, and get it over with. You’re the last person on Earth to have COVID. Get COVID,’” Ripa continued. “And I, with my mask and my hazmat suit on and rubber gloves in the house, I said, ‘If you think I am going to get sick during my already-scheduled time off instead of maximizing my time off by getting COVID during a work week, you are wrong.’”

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