Former WWE announcer and host Renee Paquette appeared on this week’s Sports Illustrated Media Podcast to talk about her departure and getting COVID-19 while working for WWE.
Paquette confirmed the rumors that WWE officials were not happy that she announced to the world that she was infected with coronavirus before she talked to them and woke up the next day after announcing it to a barrage of texts.
“There’s no shame in having got it. Again we don’t know what’s going on with anything. We’re all trying to figure it out. So when I tweeted that I had it, I wasn’t doing it as, like, “I GOT COVID.” That was not my MO when I tweeted. It was mostly, ‘Hey, I have it.’ Also, in case there were people that could’ve been around me and maybe seen that I had it, I felt a responsibility to make sure people knew that I was sick. But, yeah, it was NOT well received,” Paquette told host Jimmy Traina.
Paquette said that the company weren’t mad because she posted it, but rather because she did not give them a heads up and it was bad publicity. She noted that she felt no one was really concerned about her health when she got the positive result and that really bothered her that no one checked up on her.
Paquette admitted that WWE didn’t do everything to contain the virus back then but now they’re doing proper tests that she says should have been implemented from the very beginning.
“Since everything that’s gone down and however many people ended up getting sick, now it feels like a much safer environment. Even when I was there for SummerSlam, I was definitely less concerned about it knowing that everyone in the building has been properly tested with the nose swab and whatnot,” she continued.
The former Raw announcer also expressed how surprised she was when Florida deemed WWE as an essential business and let the company go ahead with tapings.
“It was shocking. It really shocking to see that this was deemed essential business. That made it seem like, hold on a second here,” she said.
