Maynard James Keenan contracted COVID-19 for the second time

Tool / A Perfect Circle / Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan has revealed that he contracted COVID-19 for a second time late last year, even ending up in the emergency room as he couldn't breathe.

The musician first caught coronavirus in late February 2020, detailing the last effects that he was feeling and explaining that he took "some major medications" to try and beat it. "Still coughing," he said in October. "There's still lung damage."

Unfortunately, since then, Maynard says he got it again in mid-November, and "ended up in the ER on December 1".

Read this: 20 classic albums that are 20 years old in 2021

Speaking to STROMBO on Apple Music Hits, he 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.’ 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…"

In an October interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Maynard stated that he realised he had COVID-19 the first time while touring in Australia and New Zealand. “I’m in Australia, we went out to dinner… and immediately food didn’t taste right, but this is now, this is all hindsight, right – I didn’t know at the time," he said. "We didn’t know that these are the things you’re looking for, like immediately… I had to get on an international flight the next morning, fly to New Zealand.

"So we got there, I was, like, four days in the hotel, ​’cause we have four days off before the shows. So I was just drinking water, hot showers, taking care of myself, hot tea, just trying to get through it and it sucked. But you didn’t know yet… how bad this thing could have been. If I’d have known how bad it could have been, I would have been freaking out."

Addressing coronavirus conspiracy theorists, he added: "I feel like there’s a bunch of people that… maybe I didn’t almost die, but I have friends who almost died. It was ugly. And then you have people going… apparently I’m being paid to say this. Eat a dick, dude."

Read this: Puscifer: Can the world’s most mysterious band really save us all?