Tool’s Maynard James Keenan Has Had COVID A Shocking Number Of Times

Maynard James Keenan has had COVID four times. The Tool/Puscifer/A Perfect Circle singer opened up about his ongoing battle with the virus in a recent interview with Arizona Central.

“I just had it the fourth time. I got the European-flavored one. That was fun,” he said before adding that he's since recovered. “It was [like] a flu. It’s done.”

Though other musicians have seemingly evaded illness while on tour, Keenan chalked up his reinfections on his profession. “I mean, when you’re in a room full of thousands of people, it’s being passed around,” he noted. “You get into a tube and you fly 10 hours in a contained environment, you’re gonna get it. If somebody has it and you’re gonna get it, you can get it. That’s just the nature of what it is now. We need to embrace that and stop freaking the f**k out.”

While his most current bout seemed mild and the third completely flew under the radar, Keenan's first two infections were much scarier. He first caught COVID at the onset of the pandemic after touring in Australia and New Zealand and struggled with the effects of long COVID, and his second infection landed him in the hospital at the end of 2020.

"Ugly, ugly. Couldn't breathe," he said about his second experience. "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.' 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 f**k in."