Coronavirus: Tom Hanks Shares Wife Rita Wilson Had 'A Tougher Time' Battling COVID-19 Than He Did

Actor Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson had been one of the first cases of celebrities sharing that they had tested positive for novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Back from Australia, the couple is currently observing self-isolation in Los Angeles. While they had fallen ill around the same time, Tom Hanks recently shared that his wife had a “tougher time than I did.”

In a recent interview on The National Defense Radio Show, the 63-year-old actor shared his and Rita Wilson’s initial symptoms of the respiratory illness. “Rita went through a tougher time than I did,” he said. “She had a much-higher fever and she had some other symptoms. She lost her sense of taste and smell. She got absolutely no joy from food for a better part of three weeks.”

“She was so nauseous, she had to crawl on the floor from the bed to the facilities. It lasted a while,” he further shared, adding that for him, COVID-19 was “some body aches” and he “was very fatigued” as he struggled to do even the most simple exercises when they were placed in “lockdown for three days” in a local hospital.

“Whoever it was, doctor, nurse, would come into our air pressurized room, our isolation rooms. She said, ‘How are you feeling?’ and I said, ‘I just had the weirdest thing. I just tried to do basic stretches and exercises on the floor and I couldn’t even get halfway through,’ ” he recalled. 12 minutes into a 30-min routine exercise “wiped” him.

“And she looked at me through her glasses like she was talking to the dumbest human being,” he joked. “And she said, ‘You have COVID-19.’ ”

Since their discharge and self-quarantine in Australia for two weeks, the couple has since returned to Los Angeles “have been isolated ever since.”

Recently, Rita Wilson had also opened up about her COVID-19 experience in a chat with CBS This Morning.

“Looking back, I also realized that I was losing my sense of taste and smell, which I didn’t realize at the time,” Wilson recalled, adding that being administered chloroquine, an immunosuppressive drug, by her doctors had “extreme side effects” on her. “I was completely nauseous and I had vertigo,” Wilson recalled. “I could not walk and my muscles felt very weak. I think people have to be very considerate about that drug. We don’t know if it’s helpful in this case.”