Queen guitarist Brian May has tested positive for COVID-19.
“Yep. The shocking day finally came for me. The dreaded double red line,” May wrote in an Instagram post shared on Saturday. “And yes – definitely NO sympathy please – it has been a truly horrible few days, but I’m OK.”
“And I will tell the tale. PLEASE take extra care out there, good folks,” May added. “This thing is incredibly transmissible. You really do NOT want it messing up YOUR Christmas.”
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Due to the omicron variant, May’s native UK has seen a 53% increase in new cases of COVID-19 in the last two weeks, according to the New York Times. Friday marked a new record of daily cases with 92,000.
May has been critical of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic. “At every point he did too little, too late,” May said in an interview with The Independent earlier this year.
“Hundreds, if not thousands of our relatives died because of bad advice and because of the bad decisions that Boris made with [former British Health Secretary, Matt] Hancock and those other people,” May contended. “If [Mr Johnson] had taken the precautions of shutting down the borders a year earlier, we wouldn’t have been in the situation we were. And the fact that he’s willing to trade lives quite openly for economic gain, I find horrific… completely unacceptable.”
May also had harsh words for fellow UK rocker Eric Clapton, labeling him as a “fruitcake” for his anti-vax stance.
“There’s plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps,” May said. “On the whole they’ve been very safe. There’s always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, I’m sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me.”