DJ Jazzy Jeff recently revealed that he’d joined the ranks of hip-hop artists who contracted the coronavirus and in a pair of new interviews, detailed his experience having COVID-19, including symptoms, effects, and his feeling of being “terrified to death.”
During a call-in with his former rhyme partner Will Smith’s Snapchat series, Will From Home, he told Smith that he thinks “we’re really at the beginning” of the crisis. He reeled off a long list of afflictions, including, “a temperature that reached 103. I had the chills. I lost sense of smell. I lost sense of taste.”
On another chat with Tamron Hall, he said, “I didn’t even realize the severity of it.” He explained how the symptoms first started to come over him, saying, “When my wife and I were at the store, I looked at her and told her I didn’t feel well. And she was asking what was wrong, and I said ‘I feel a little achy, like I’m coming down with something.’” After that, he says, “I literally went home and got into bed and almost don’t remember the next 11 days after that.”
During that call, he also explained that a doctor wouldn’t test him for the virus, but instead “gave me a flu test and then gave me an x-ray on my lungs and said I had pneumonia in both of my lungs.” That diagnosis, he says, “terrified me to death.”
Jeff hypothesized that he’d likely contracted the virus at the annual Black Summit of the National Brotherhood of Skiers in Ketchum, Idaho in March, where over 100 attendees reportedly went home ill with COVID-19.