Pink Speaks Candidly About Getting COVID-19 With Her Son on ‘Ellen’
Pink was one of the first guests on the quarantine edition of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, talking to the daytime host via video chat about how she and her son Jameson came down with the coronavirus.
“It started with Jameson, actually, and you know, he’s three — three-year-olds get sick all the time,” she said. Pink and her family went into quarantine on March 11th, and Jameson began developing a fever three days later before showing more major symptoms, including severe chest pains. At one point, the family was concerned that they might have to take him to the hospital.
Pink said she never had a fever while ill, but she developed a sore throat, and at one point woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. (Pink has had asthma all her life, but said she hasn’t had a major attack in nearly 30 years.)
“I got it the second-worst [out of my family]; I’m 40, I have asthma and I’m fit as a fiddle,” she told Ellen. “It’s not just affecting people over 65.” She stressed much of the confusion surrounding the illness: the wide range of symptoms, how she and her son got it during quarantine, the fact that her husband Carey Hart and daughter Willow didn’t develop symptoms, and that several of her friends think they got COVID-19 in February.
Pink also addressed the controversy over access to testing. “I would say, you should be angry that I can get a test and you can’t. But being angry at me is not going to help anything, it’s not gonna solve the issue of the fact that you can’t get your hands on a test…And number two, tell me anybody with a sick three-year-old that could get their hands on a test wouldn’t take it. And if they say that, I’m calling bullshit.”
She went on: “The healthcare system is jacked. The government is, in a way, failing us by not being prepared. But this is where we’re at, and thank God we’re getting better.”
Upon announcing that she had coronavirus, Pink pledged to donate $1 million to coronavirus aid efforts, including $500,000 to the hospital in Philadelphia where her mother worked for 18 years.
“It’s inner-city, it’s North Philly, they don’t have a lot of resources or a lot of ways to have donations like that,” she said. “So it’s meant a lot to my mom, and to a lot of her friends who still work there.”