Maynard James Keenan is recovering after contracting COVID-19 again
Tool, Puscifer and A Perfect Circle‘s Maynard James Keenan contracted coronavirus last February which left him with long-term side effects. Now, he has revealed he is recovering after contracting COVID-19 for the second time this past fall. Read more: Miley Cyrus teases a new cover of this Nine Inch Nails classic—watch Back in October, Maynard […]
Back in October, Maynard James Keenan detailed his experience with contracting coronavirus in February. For him, COVID-19 left him with some residual side effects including lung damage.
“I mean, I was still recovering from having gotten COVID at the end of February,” he said. “I’m still dealing with the residual effects. But it was ugly. I survived it, but it wasn’t pretty. So I definitely had to deal with that….And there’s after-effects. I had to go through some major medications to undo the residual effects. Still coughing. There’s still lung damage.”
Now, he has revealed he contracted coronavirus for the second time in November. As a result, he ended up in the emergency room with severe symptoms.
“I got it like mid-November and ended up in the ER on December 1st,” he revealed on Apple Music‘s Strombo. “Ugly, ugly. Couldn’t breathe. I could barely put two words together without going into a coughing fit…It ended up kind of also progressing into pneumonia.”
He also further detailed the real strain the healthcare system was under as cases continued to surge late last year.
“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.’”
After seeing the dire circumstances the hospital was facing, Keenan made the decision to recover at home.
“You’re just treating symptoms at that point,” he said. “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.”
Back in October, before contracting COVID-19 again, Keenan addressed the numerous views people have about the pandemic and safety.
“Yeah, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s just an absurdity. We wear seatbelts. We don’t smoke in trains, planes or taxis anymore, or even restaurants. There’s reasons for those things. I don’t know. I feel like there’s this twist on the idea of personal freedom where somehow freedom is you being able to walk into anybody’s house and take a dump on their meal or shout ugly things at their grandma. That’s not what freedom is.
Freedom is the ability to pursue your lifestyle, pursue what you want to do for your family, for your future, what education you want to get,” he says. “And with that freedom comes a responsibility to look out for yourself, for your neighbor, for your family, for everybody. So there are some compromises that come along with freedom. I’m not sure why that’s so difficult to grasp.”