Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan has revealed that he contracted COVID-19 for a second time late last year, and suffered severe breathing issues that brought him to the emergency room.
The musician first caught coronavirus in late February 2020, and at that time shared the lasting symptoms he was experiencing, saying that he took “some major medications” to try and beat it. “Still coughing,” he said in October. “There’s still lung damage.” Maynard says he got COVID-19 again in mid-November, and “ended up in the ER on December 1”.
Maynard says, “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.”
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