Chris Cuomo just wants his COVID-19 battle to be over: ‘It is in my head’

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo is still battling symptoms — and his own psyche — in his ongoing fight with COVID-19.

In conversation with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Monday’s edition of “Prime Time,” a frustrated Cuomo offered another update on his health, which has yet to fully recover from his “freaky” bout with the novel coronavirus two weeks after his diagnosis.

“I’m scared by this. I’m scared by the potential of this, and it frustrates me because I can’t get out of this basement,” he said. “I still have this low-grade fever. I can’t shake it. And I know everybody tells me it’s gradual. It takes time. It’s anywhere between two to three and a half weeks — but it is maddening to have this little, stupid fever.”

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Though his body aches have subsided and his breathing has improved, the veteran broadcast journalist said the respiratory illness is continuing to take a toll on his mental health. Earlier this month, Cuomo detailed some of the mind tricks the disease has played on him in the form of late-night hallucinations.

“People are afraid to talk about it, and I’m not: This virus creates emotional illness and creates psychological illness,” he said Monday. “I’m telling you, it is in my head. Not just figuratively, in terms of messing with you because you’re sick for a long time — it is causing people depression and it’s creating brain fog and it’s creating edginess in people. … I am experiencing that.”

The “Prime Time” host also compared his cabin fever to the whole of the United States, most of which continues to remain on indefinite lockdown as healthcare workers around the world race to slow the spread of the virus.

“I am a metaphor, Sanjay, for the country,” Cuomo said. “I’m ready to get out of the basement. I’m sick of being sick. I’ve had it, I want to get back to work. But I’m not ready. And I don’t have a plan to be ready. That’s where we are right now.”

Cuomo is one of a handful of newscasters keeping the public informed about their conditions after contracting COVID-19, including CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, who revealed her own diagnosis shortly after her colleague tested positive.

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On Monday’s episode of his SiriusXM radio show, “Let’s Get After It,” Cuomo reportedly threw some indirect shade at CNN, admitting he doesn’t like “what I do professionally” or “trafficking in things that I think are ridiculous.”

“I don’t want to spend my time doing things that I don’t think are valuable enough to me personally,” he said, adding that he doesn’t value “indulging irrationality, hyper-partisanship,” “talking to Democrats about things that I don’t really believe they mean” or “talking to Republicans about them parroting things they feel they have to say.”