Tool’s Maynard James Keenan Has Had COVID Twice

You would hope that if there was any silver lining to contracting COVID-19, it would be that, assuming you come through it okay, you now have antibodies and won’t get it again.

Alas, this is not necessarily the case… and now at least one prominent musician has, indeed, been reinfected: Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A Perfect Circle, Puscifer).

This past October, Keenan revealed that he’d become infected in February, early in the pandemic, when the band was touring Australia and New Zealand. At the time of the revelation, Keenan said that was “still dealing with the residual effects.”

Yesterday (February 3), during an interview with Apple Music’s George “Strombo” Stroumboulopoulos, Keenan said that he became reinfected in “mid-November and ended up in the ER on December 1.”

That sucks, but at least the second hit wasn’t nearly as bad as the first, right?

Wrong.

Asked to describe his second go-round with the virus, the singer said:

“Ugly, ugly. Couldn’t breathe. I could barely put two words together without going into a coughing fit that, you know? It ended up kind of also progressing into pneumonia. So, if I stayed in the hospital, they said, ‘Okay, we can keep you here, but you’re fighting 12 other people for a bed and a ventilator we don’t have, so what do you want to do?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I need to breathe and I need to sleep.’ So, you’re just treating symptoms at that point. There’s nothing you can do other than treat the symptom, so for a real cough medicine, not the crap over-the-counter and then like an inhaler, and some antibiotics to fight the pneumonia and strap the fuck in.”

So that sounds fun. Quick, everyone — to a packed Steel Panther concert!!

You can listen to the entire interview below.

[via Billboard]