In March, it felt like the pandemic learning curve was pretty steep for most people. What was socially acceptable on March 5th was completely unacceptable by March 25th. We learned so much in such a short time. All of which to say, I can sort of understand how people were partying and acting like nothing was wrong in the first week of March. We were so innocent then. David and Victoria Beckham weren’t paying attention to the pandemic around that time as well. Their son Brooklyn Beckham turned 21 on March 4, and the Beckhams had a big party in the UK for his birthday. In the days before that, Victoria and David were in Miami for some massive parties for David’s Miami football club. So… yeah, turns out that David and Victoria caught Covid around then, and Victoria feared they were early “super-spreaders.”
David and Victoria Beckham secretly battled coronavirus after catching it schmoozing in the States. Several relatives and staff members also came down with the killer bug following the launch of Becks’ new football club. Victoria, 46, feared they may be “super-spreaders” after flying back to the UK for son Brooklyn’s 21st birthday do, with guests such as Stormzy and Emma Bunton. Tests later confirmed the couple’s Covid diagnosis.
Last night a friend said: “It was an absolute nightmare scenario. David was on duty for his club Inter Miami, and Victoria and the family flew down to support him. They attended a couple of swanky networking events as David had promotional duties, and were shaking hands and kissing fans and various club dignitaries. They then flew back to London, and were whisked straight to their Cotswolds mansion.”
The source said the couple celebrated Brooklyn’s 21st before a short trip back to the States, this time to Miami. When they returned, the source went on, “David started to feel ill and then Victoria developed a sore throat and high temperature. At the same time, several of their team including drivers, bodyguards and assistants fell ill — a couple of them very badly so. Victoria really panicked and made the whole family quarantine rigidly for more than two weeks. She was utterly petrified they might be super-spreaders, and did all she could to minimize all future risk. Not only was she poorly in bed, she was also completely panicked. It was a rough few weeks.”
After making full recoveries, Posh and 45-year-old Becks checked in regularly with their team. They are understood to have sent “care packages” to at least two staff members who were particularly badly affected.
The couple spent the entire summer holed up in their country manor — complete with swimming pool, football pitch and hot tub — and declined several party invites. They later had swab and antibody tests before holidaying in Greece and Italy to ensure they were safe to travel. The pair also canceled middle son Romeo’s planned 18th birthday last weekend over fears they would break social distancing rules. Their nightmare COVID ordeal is believed to have begun on March 1, when Becks’ Inter Miami side played their first game away at Los Angeles FC.
I mean… considering all of the back-and-forth traveling, I’m struggling to understand why everyone believes that Posh and Becks absolutely caught the virus in Miami. In the first week of March, they were mingling and partying with everyone in the UK AND America. It’s pretty likely they caught it in America, sure, but it’s also clear that they didn’t take any of the pandemic talk seriously until they started feeling like sh-t. Anyway, I’m glad everyone involved in the Beckham household and support staff is feeling better.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, WENN.
I don’t understand why people are being so secretive about a Covid diagnosis. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson didn’t wait six months to tell their story.
But when they got sick it seems like they made no attempt to warn the thousands of people they interacted with that they may be exposed.
So- they’re “sorry”, but they’re still assholes who may have led to tons of outbreaks of the illness, some of which could have been stopped if people they were in contact with had been told to quarantine.
Am i missing something about this?
This! If they had immediately said “OMG everyone, we’re sick- if you’ve had any contact with us from this date, please quarantine yourself!” it probably could have prevented more cases.
No one should have been partying and traveling in early March.
In March people knew about the virus…hell a lot of people that follow the news knew about the virus back in late December. This was really careless of them to do. I remember hearing about a lot of people cancelling their march break/spring break plans…yet these two just went about their lives as if their money keeps them immune. Also, they could have caught the virus in the U.K. Justin Trudeau’s wife caught the virus on a trip to England back in March.
+1
I got the virus back in December from someone living in London. I lived in Paris and flew to America the first week of March. I call BS on them blaming the US for it because up until that point the US was getting it from abroad. The virus didn’t originate in the US. But Europeans love to blame the US for everything. It wasn’t until middle of March that France stopped taking in international travelers.
These two superspreaders brought it from Europe to the US and infected countless people in Miami before going back to the UK to hole up in their mansion. Screw them.
I consider myself very well-informed (daily NPR listener on my 45-minute commute both ways, as well as at my desk most of the day if I am not on calls or in meetings, and a subscriber to and daily reader of NYT, WaPo and The Atlantic) and I don’t remember it being a significant story until mid-March. My kids’ spring break was wrapping up when the school announced that they were closing around the 11-12th and that was the first I’d heard about it being a significant event here. None of that is to excuse them for not warning others they had been in contact with ASAP once they realized they were ill, but I think it’s incorrect to assert that COVID was a well-known threat in December, or even as early as February.
I was also fairly well informed of what was going on. In the first week of March, you could count the number of positive cases in NYC (where I live) on two hands. Spring Break at my child’s school is always the last two weeks in March and there were families who were starting to talk about cancelling Spring Break plans to go to Europe. Those were the very first signs that real trouble was brewing in the US.
We went to a hockey tournament in Buffalo the first weekend of March. The advice at that time was wash your hands, don’t share water bottles and lots of Purell. Two days after we got home, Kiddo’s school was one of the first in NYC to close on March 10.
Should they have notified the people they were in contact with? Sure – to the best of their ability. Did everyone know that COVID was a worldwide threat in December? No. In February, maybe, if you were an epidemiologist. It wasn’t until the second week of March that it really became clear how bad it could be.
Selfish a$$holes.
It’s not like me to defend but our lives were completely normal without any thinking about covid until the 12 of March, when everything just stopped.
Seriously, the last huge arena concert in my town was on the 7th!
Same here! I actually went to a family supper on March 8th for my SIL’s birthday, by the 12th-13th pretty much everything had shut down. I am not trying to defend them at all (especially if they didn’t right away tell people close to them that they had tested positive, talk about selfish) but the situation changed almost overnight.
Even someone like me who followed the Covid news pretty much daily since December 2019 didn’t guess what was coming.
Yeah everything in my county was ‘normal’ until March 17. I was working as a bartender and we only had a big drop in customers for about four days before that.
Did they privately reach out to everyone they had contact with? If not that’s pretty selfish.
What’s everyone complaining about? They sent gift baskets.
That’s hilarious. You just summed up the head up the ass, celebrity mindset perfectly. Also, they only sent them to those having a particularly hard time with the illness. Apparently, the rest just had to be grateful that they got the honour of receiving a possibly life threatening illness, from such special people.
I skimmed this story really quickly but my eyes locked in on the line about them sending “care packages” to two (or more) staffers they may have infected. For goodness’s sake, I hope they did a lot more than that!!!! Fully paid sick leave and some kind of hazard pay/bonus would be a damn sight better than any gift basket, as a sign of consideration from an employer who exposed their employee to a potentially deadly virus.
There’s a stink of spin on this. Something tells me they are trying to get in front of a story which was going to break. They were worried they could be super spreaders? They most likely were. But now they get to spin it as if they were so worried and concerned but everything is OK thank God. Eff them. Assholes.
I agree. There has to be a reason why they are coming out with this information NOW. They don’t anything without thinking of how it will look.
I have to say that is one thing I don’t miss with the pandemic- celebrities flying here there and everywhere like the rest of us use our cars. Like they have to celebrate a birthday in a different country, but they fly back and forth, stay in places just a few days. So unnecessary, that is just to look “look at us, we so rich” – but what a way to pollute the environment with their private jets. I think the pandemic is showing the selfish ones (hi Madonna). I dunno, maybe just me but I always secretly wish for something to kick them off their high-mighty ledge. I feel there are secrets here that somehow stay hidden with this couple, but waiting to explode.
Sorella – that’s still not the case. All of these celebs are being allowed in and out of the country for their vacations while the rest of us mere mortals are banned. Kyle Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Chris Evans, Brad Pitt, I’m sure there are more that I’m not thinking of. Even Tom Hanks was in Greece last month. Everyone who isn’t a celeb is not allowed to travel and see their families because of bans on both sides but these assholes get to fly anywhere they want. People haven’t seen their families since March! But Trump won’t let anyone in and Europe won’t let anyone in in return (tit for tat) so we’re all just stuck here until the Orange One is kicked out of office. The only one who is allowing travel is Denmark I believe. Why doesn’t anyone talk about how our glorious dictator has essentially made us a prison? We literally have no right to travel, airlines are being bailed out while charging customers $2000 plane tickets, so people can’t even fly to the UK for instance and quarantine. We’re a prison state. But I’m glad Kyle got her boob selfies in front of a church. *eyeroll*
Sorry to rant, I’ve just been extremely angry about this since May. I have written the State Department, written senators, written the Orange one, countless times and no one cares that we are being kept from loved ones. We’re not traveling for fun, we want to see our families and loved ones and we can’t. But I’m glad Chris Evans is enjoying London Nobu.
Don’t forget the Kardashians…If I see them on one more vacation I will literally lose it! Such a flagrant display of wealth and privilege, when so many have lost so much this year. And they have all the space, pools, food and entertainment they need in their 30KSF homes! FFS!
They very well could have caught it in London. London was a hotspot long before Florida was. It’s where Prince Charles and Idris Elba and Boris Johnson caught it.
Valiantly it’s where I got it back in December! My ex came from London where he lives to visit me before Christmas and he got me sick. I was in Paris for 3 months after and no one had it (yet). England was a hotspot long before Miami was.
I love me some Dave & Vicky, but YES, they were completely irresponsible here, and YES, they were superspreaders.
*sigh*
It’s hard to still like people when they are so stupid sometimes.
It was hard to know in March. I came down with symptoms March 4, and tested negative twice in the next two weeks. I stayed home anyway, but I work from home, and my kids were home from school (our district was the first in the country to cancel classes), so it was easy for me. But, especially very early in my illness, if I’d been busier and had important commitments, I would have felt well enough to carry on and keep going to things. I can honestly say I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that I might have Covid, it was all just very new. The symptoms being reported from China were SO much more serious than anything I experienced that it wasn’t until I lost my sense of taste and smell, 14 days after I came down with my first symptoms, that I really accepted that I probably had it. Then in May, I tested positive for antibodies. I was very thankful that I was so cautious despite testing negative, even though my husband and many of my friends thought I was being a nut.
The good news…six months later, I still have neutralizing antibodies. The blood bank keeps calling me back to donate plasma. I’ll keep going until they stop calling.
So in January I was sick as a dog for a weekend. Fever, sore throat, muscle pain you name it. By Monday was feeling somewhat better and decided to go to work because that’s how I do when I have the “flu”. If I saty in bed I get worse. It was a hellish week ler me tell you. NOBODY mentioned Corona Virus or testing to me and I live in Lombardia, Italy the epicenter of the virus with more than 30000 deaths in 5 months. In March 1 I went skiing for 9 days. Stayed with friends all the time. Slept in the same room and then when I got back I was sick sick sick for 25 days. I called my doctor who visited me at home and gave me antibiotics for my throat, then called the emergency numbers to at least get tested. By March 15 the pandemic was on full force and unless you were dying here nobody would test you. I called my bosses to let them know that “maybe” I have it and to help me get tested because I had been in contact with so many people from work. Nothing. People were trying to hide the possibility one of theirs was sick. In fact to this day we don’t know from work how many were sick during these last It was like a death shadow cast upon you.
For them telling 1000 people or more that MAYBE you got the virus from us would have been a huge blow. On the other hand I can believe maybe they let important people for them know. We don’t know the whole story. I know I did let my friends and closest colleagues that I was sick as a dog and to keep a distance for a while.