Devo Lead Singer Shares His Scary COVID Story

Another celebrity has come forward to tell his coronavirus tale: This time, it's Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder and lead singer of Devo, and he says he nearly died of COVID-19 over the summer. He was taking the virus seriously, but while at work at his commercial music company near the end of May, he unintentionally ended up in a group with multiple people he didn't know. Within a few days, he had a 103-degree fever. "It went from, ‘I don’t feel good’ on Tuesday to an ambulance to Cedars on Saturday. It was terrifying," wife Anita Greenspan tells the Los Angeles Times. He was in the ICU for 18 days, in and out of consciousness, often hallucinating and delusional.

Greenspan and the couple's two teenage daughters made constant video calls to stay connected while Mothersbaugh was on a ventilator, and he credits them with saving his life. At a moment when he felt "‘I could just float down this river right now, and it would be really peaceful. It wouldn’t be a freak-out. It wouldn’t be something I’d be scared of. I could really just do that," his family called, he says. And because of that, he has some advice for the general public: "If you have anyone that you know who’s in ICU with COVID, contact them and keep them in touch with the outside world, because it’s easy to lose track of where you are and why you are." Read his full story here. (More coronavirus stories.)