NEWSTALK PRESENTER CIARA Kelly has announced that she has the coronavirus Covid-19 live on air.

“I’m dealing with it and I know it’s different for very many people,” she said on her weekday programme Lunchtime Live, presented from the hot press in her home.

“For me, it felt like a bad flu. I had a sore throat; I had a tightness and a burning in my chest and I was a bit short of breath. I was very tired and bit dizzy and a bit wobbly when I stood up and I guessed I had it.

I got a test on Sunday. A lovely paramedic came, in full gear, to my house and swabbed my throat and my nose and last night I was informed that I have Covid-19.

She said that she hadn’t come in contact with a confirmed case or been abroad, and had been washing her hands regularly and properly. 

She said she and her family are in quarantine and that this has all “come that bit closer to home for me”.

Kelly said she had been reading about it in the news and now it is “inside my home, and it may infect the rest of my family too”.

Kelly said it won’t stop her from working and presenting her show, as she wanted to feel “useful” during the Covid-19 crisis – adding that it might provide comfort for people that she’s waking up every day and living with the virus.

As Kelly has previously practiced as a GP, she said that when she is better she plans to put her stethoscope back on, as being an ‘immune doctor’ is something useful now.

She asked people to “stay safe, stay home and stop the spread as much as you can”.

Speaking to Joe Duffy on RTÉ’s Liveline this afternoon, Kelly described her symptoms before getting tested.

“It started with a sore throat but then it became a cough and it became a tightness and a pain in my chest on breathing, I had a lot of chest pain.

“I had a symptom I’ve never had and that’s why I thought this is new, this is something different. I was burning from the back of my throat and my nose I was burning, all the way down into the middle of my lungs, a horrible sensation actually. And I went, I don’t know this I don’t recognise this, I’ve never had this in my life. This is something where weird and different.”