Tom Hanks on surviving coronavirus: ‘I had crippling body aches, fatigue and couldn’t concentrate’
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American actor Tom Hanks in an interview with The Guardian spoke on his experience getting infected with the coronavirus.
Back in March, while he was filming in Australia, he and his wife, Rita Wilson, became, he says, “the celebrity canaries in the coalmine of all things Covid-19”.
They were among the earliest and certainly most famous people in the west to be diagnosed with the virus on 10 March, and were hospitalised for three days. I ask if they have suffered any after effects of the illness.
“Oh no, we’re fine. Our discomfort because of the virus was pretty much done in two weeks and we had very different reactions, and that was odd. My wife lost her sense of taste and smell, she had severe nausea, she had a much higher fever than I did. I just had crippling body aches, I was very fatigued all the time and I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than about 12 minutes. That last bit is kinda like my natural state anyway,” he says, with another chuckle, as if he were my father telling me there are no more monsters under the bed.
Hanks added that “When we were in the hospital, I said: ‘I’m 63, I have type 2 diabetes, I had a stent in my heart – am I a red flag case?’ But as long as our temperatures did not spike, and our lungs did not fill up with something that looked like pneumonia, they were not worried. I’m not one who wakes up in the morning wondering if I’m going to see the end of the day or not. I’m pretty calm about that.”
