Rachel Maddow tells Stephen Colbert partner’s Covid-19 experience was ‘the scariest thing’

Mikula is now going through the ‘long tail’ of symptoms, says Maddow

Rachel Maddow says watching her partner go through the symptoms of Covid-19 was “the scariest thing” she has experienced.

The TV host was featured as a guest on Stephen Colbert’s late show on Wednesday night.

Colbert asked her about her partner Susan Mikula. Maddow first publicly discussed Mikula’s diagnosis last month on MSNBC.

She described Mikula as “the centre of my universe”, adding: “She’s [a] planet and I’m the satellite.” Maddow also said at the time that “at one point, we really thought that there was a possibility that [Covid-19] might kill her”.

On Wednesday, Maddow told Colbert that Mikula is now experiencing the “long tail” of the symptoms, but is “out of the woods”.

She then discussed the reaction with which her announcement was met last month.

“The reaction to me talking about that on the air, to me saying, ‘Listen, I take this as seriously as anybody but I just realised that I wasn’t that scared about getting it myself, but seeing Susan suffering with it is the scariest thing in my life and I would now do anything to prevent that sort of risk to her,' – the way people responded to that made me realise we need to pay closer attention to what motivates people in their behaviour around risk,” Maddow told Colbert.

She said it had been “revelatory” to realise how much she cared about Mikula’s safety compared to her own.

“We have to think about what moves people more than we already have been,” she added. “Especially now that we’re going to have this vaccine, we’re going to have to think about what motivates people to do the right thing around the vaccination programme.”