During an appearance this morning on Sunrise, Kate Langbroek revealed she is stuck in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak.
WATCH: Dave Hughes tells how Kate Langbroek dumped him
She told Seven’s Sunrise the ‘normally vibrant place has suddenly got a chill about it’.
The Australian radio star and her family have been living in Italy since January 2019 on an extended gap year.
‘Until last night we were living relatively normally, then the Premier of Italy declared the whole country a red zone and everything changed overnight,’ she said from her Bologna apartment.
‘Supermarkets are only open Monday-Friday during the day, everything has to close at 6pm, there’s no school and we’ve been told this will continue until April the third.
‘Normally vibrant places are absolutely dead and people are regarding each other with a bit of suspicion now.
‘There is suddenly a feeling of what was such a warm, vibrant place has now got a chill about it.’
Italy currently has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases outside of China, with more than 9,000 people infected and over 463 deaths.
Late last year, her former radio co-host and comedy favourite Dave Hughes told how Kate bizarrely ditched their show – and him – from her Italian bolthole.
Revealing all during an appearance on Seven’s Sunrise, Dave confirmed that Kate had not been in touch for a number of weeks before he got a surprising text.
‘It’s a weird one because she’s gone to Italy to find herself in Italy with her family,’ Dave explained.
‘She’s over there and we followed her and set up a little studio there in Bologna, so she can broadcast the show from there and she was doing that for the first six months of the year.
‘And then she just texted me a couple of weeks ago and said, “Nope, can’t be bothered for the rest of the year”.’
Although laughing, Dave seemed taken aback by the way he was ditched, after the pair have enjoyed a long and fruitful working relationship.
‘It was just a text message!’ he said. ‘I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of weeks and then just a text message!’
Dave confronted Kate on air about the fiasco last week, telling her, ‘We were planning for you to come back in a few weeks.’
But it seems things were never locked in, at least according to Kate, who replied, ‘Kate, who was speaking from Italy, replied: ‘Well, you were trying to talk me into that…’
Kate, who will make guest appearances, will be replaced on air by Ed Kavalee, but the show will still be called Hughesy & Kate.
The radio star, 53, famously fled Melbourne for Bologna in January, when she relocated her entire family following an attack on their home.
Speaking to Tommy Little on The Sunday Project, the mum-of-four revealed another reason for the move, saying that her eldest son’s battle with leukemia when he was just six years old had inspired the family to go on an ‘adventure’.
‘Our eldest son Lewis, who’s 15 now, and healthy and beautiful, had leukemia when he was six, and was in treatment for four years, and nearly died,’ she told the presenter.
‘For so long we couldn’t go anywhere, we couldn’t travel anywhere — I mean we went to the hospital, we went home.
‘There seemed something really life-affirming about having an adventure together as a family,’ she confessed.