Maynard James Keenan revealed he was hospitalized in December after contracting COVID-19 for a second time.
Keenan details the experience in a recent interview on The Strombo Show saying, “I could barely put two words together without going into a coughing fit. 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.’”
Keenan then opted to finish out his recovery from home saying, “So, you’re just treating symptoms at that point. There’s nothing you can do other than treat the symptom.” As for how he treated his second bout with COVID at home, he said he used, “…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 f— in.”
In October, Keenan said in an interview with AZ Central he contracted the coronavirus in February 2020 and he was still dealing with residual side effects months later.
“But it’s real. And there’s after-effects,” he said. “I had to go through some major medications to undo the residual effects. Still coughing. There’s still lung damage. Several of my friends, too. Very not old people, young people, in shape, runners, who contracted it as well. And they’re still dealing with some of the after-effects. I lost a few family members.”
When asked if he was feeling better months later, Keenan said, “Well no. I still have the cough. Every other day, I have these coughing fits because my lungs are still damaged at the tips. And I just got over the inflammation that was going on with my wrist and hands. I had an autoimmune attack on my system in the form of, like, a rheumatoid arthritis. Basically, from what I understand, it attacks weird spots and it’s random. So that’s what I got. That was my prize.”
Later in October, Keenan would appear on The Joe Rogan Experience and address those who doubted his bout with the illness.
“I feel like there’s a bunch of people that … maybe I didn’t almost die, but I have friends who almost died,” said Keenan. “It was ugly. And then you have people going … apparently I’m being paid to say this. Eat a d—, dude.”