Hilary Duff Shared A COVID-19 Update After Starting Work On HIMYF

The pandemic is not over yet, and Hilary Duff just offered a stark reminder. The How I Met Your Father star revealed in her Instagram story on Friday, Aug. 20 that she has come down with a breakthrough COVID-19 infection. Sharing a photo of herself lying in bed, she called the delta variant “a little b*tch” and offered a list of her symptoms to her followers.

“No taste or smell. sinus pressure. Brain fog,” Duff wrote in her story. However, even amid her struggle, the Younger vet highlighted a silver lining. She added that she’s “happy to be vaxxed,” seemingly in a nod to research that shows breakthrough infections tend to be milder and shorter than cases in people who are unvaccinated.

Duff’s assessment of the delta variant seems to align with the science. Delta is currently the United States’ most common strain of the virus that causes COVID-19, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and not only that, it’s more than two times as contagious as earlier strains. The CDC notes on its website that “some data suggest the Delta variant might cause more severe illness than previous strains in unvaccinated persons.” Amid its spread, U.S. COVID-19 cases are again sharply climbing.

The actor’s bad news comes just days after she posted the first photo of her on the HIMYF set alongside her co-stars Francia Raisa, Brandon Micheal Hall, Tom Ainsley, Tien Tran, Suraj Sharma, and Chris Lowell. Showing off the group on Instagram on Aug. 17, she wrote, “Who’s ready for us??? We may or may not have been sitting in front of a certain someones [sic] apartment…. #himyf” The actors are not masked in the photo, which is potentially worrisome considering Duff’s diagnosis soon thereafter and the fact that “fully vaccinated people with Delta variant breakthrough infections can spread the virus to others,” per the CDC. So far, none of Duff’s six co-workers in the photo has shared a health update of their own. (Bustle has reached out to Hulu for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.)

Unfortunately for Duff, this is not her first brush with COVID-19. In November, she shared on Instagram that she was quarantining after being exposed to the virus. Duff — then pregnant with her third child — was definitely not thrilled about that experience, either. “Fml,” she wrote over an Instagram story at the time. She did, however, make it through her isolation and go on to give birth to a healthy baby, daughter Mae James Bair, on March 24.

The actor will hopefully be healthy and back to work soon. She and the How I Met Your Father cast and crew have been eagerly anticipating being able to film the series, with Duff writing on Instagram on Aug. 11 that “excited doesn’t even begin to cover it.”