Jackson Browne says he tested positive for coronavirus
James Taylor helps Boston hospital with $1 million donation
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com/Reuters) – Jackson Browne has tested positive for coronavirus, he told Rolling Stone. Although the 71-year-old singer-songwriter would seem to be part of a vulnerable demographic, he reports that his symptoms have been mild and he has not required hospitalization or medication.
“I feel lucky that I’m not really badly affected. I guess I’ve got a really strong immune system,” Browne told the magazine. “You just don’t know who’s got a strong immune system and who doesn’t. I was told today by my doctor there’s a 19-year-old on a ventilator in Santa Monica.”
Browne says he felt ill with a cough and high temperature after returning to California after performing at Love Rocks NYC, an annual benefit for God’s Love We Deliver that was held at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on March 12. As of the date of the interview, he had been self-quarantined for 10 days.
“I’m presuming I got this flying back and forth to New York to do Love Rocks show at the Beacon,” he told the magazine’s Angie Martoccio. “And now it turns out that several people who were at that show have tested positive. I’m going to try and get in touch with everybody and keep talking with them…. Now, I wish I hadn’t gone to New York and done this benefit. I think to myself how much simpler would it have been had I just called in and said, no, I’m not going to travel on a cross-country flight and spend two days in New York with all these people that are singing all over the country.”
Browne referred specifically to a crew member and not any of the other performers (who included Dave Matthews, Cyndi Lauper, Chris and Rich Robinson, Leon Bridges, Whoopi Goldberg, Jeff Garlin and Paul Shaffer). As coronavirus cautions were beginning to rise rapidly at the time, the benefit ended up having no ticketed audience and being limited to “essential personnel” and family members only, with those who had bought tickets getting access to a live-stream.
“THERE WAS already a question of being careful and saying, ‘I’ll bump elbows and not shake hands and won’t hug anybody. I won’t behave like that at this show.’ But still, you’re in close quarters and you’re breathing the same air. They are swabbing the mics, but somebody in the crew has it. For all I know, he got it from me. I could have got it from the crew member that has it or he could have got it from me. I don’t know. I traveled on an airplane to get there.”
Now he warns others, “You have to assume you have it. You need to assume that you in some way could very easily pass it to someone else…. There’s no guarantee that because you’re young, you’re not going to be affected by this. The thing we should all be very aware of is by traveling around the city and moving this germ from place to place, inadvertently, you are risking the lives of everybody, including the most vulnerable, people who have asthma or people who are really old…. There’s so much we don’t know. The one thing you can do is not go anywhere, not show up anywhere.”
Meanwhile, one of Browne’s 1980s compatriots, James Taylor, and his wife, Kim Taylor, have made a $1 million donation to Massachusetts General Hospital to help with the institution’s efforts to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
“There is no question that it’s a point of pride for New Englanders to claim the MGH as their hospital – our hospital – and this is especially true today with the threat coming from a new and insidious virus,” Taylor said in a statement. “Kim and I want to be part of this fight. We have been so inspired by the courage and sacrifice of the health care heroes in the trenches who are working so hard to protect us all.”
James Taylor’s biographical details make it clearer why this might be personal for the singer-songwriter, beyond just widely shared local pride. The singer was born at the hospital, and hIs father, Isaac, was a doctor who completed his residency, served as chief resident and conducted research at the MGH.
The gift to Mass General allows the hospital to determine where to best direct the donation, be it purchasing supplies and equipment or going toward research into treatments and prevention for COVID-19. The money will go into the MGH President’s Emergency Response Fund, set up after the Boston Marathon bombing for sudden needs like these.
“The generosity of James and Kim Taylor will not only help Mass General respond to this outbreak but will also provide a meaningful morale boost to our caregivers, the many staff who support them, and the scientists who are working to defeat this scourge,” said Mass General president Peter L. Slavin.