LACUNA COIL's CRISTINA SCABBIA Reflects On Her COVID-19 Battle: 'The First Week Was Not Fun'

LACUNA COIL frontwoman Cristina Scabbia spoke to Spain's The Metal Circus about her recent battle with COVID-19. She said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I got it in December. I spent Christmas and New Year's Eve alone at home. Yay! [Laughs] Actually, it was not that bad, because I am a very independent person, so even when I'm alone, I'm fine. And I am not a huge lover of Christmas and New Year's Eve anyway. Of course, I missed my family, but at the same time, I was, like, 'I have everything I need. I have a TV, I have a computer, I have a microphone, I have all the outlets that can keep me busy,' so I cannot complain."

Asked if she got very sick after she was diagnosed with the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, Cristina said: "The first week was not fun. Two days were pretty bad because I had a high fever for not even a day — a fever that went down with medicines. But it hits every person differently, and the way it hit me was not on the throat. For example, a lot of people suffered throat and coughing. For me, it was just like normal coughing. The throat was okay. I had a sense of small and taste; they never went away. But for a week I suffered. Like, my nerves were hurting — from the back into the legs. I couldn't find a comfortable position in bed, so I couldn't sleep because I would keep waking up because I had, like, nerve pain. Like sort of a sciatica, but double — not only on one side; on the other side as well. It was pretty bad. Then the second week I had sort of a congestion, so I was talking very nasally. But overall, I was okay."

Scabbia, who confirmed she was fully vaccinated when she contracted COVID-19, went on to blast people who refuse to get the shot because they can still get the disease and pass it along, even if vaccinated.

"Well, that's a hard topic because I get really, really angry, in a way, when I talk about this," she said. "Because I trust science. A lot of my friends are scientists, biologists, virologists, so I talk to them constantly. And to see people that have no idea about medicine, including me, because I never studied science or any type of matters related to science, thinking that they know everything about how a vaccine works, what's in there, long-term risks, trials, it's very depressing. Because now on Internet, everybody's an expert after watching a couple of videos on YouTube or a web site created the day before from a person that you don't know. Yet again some people [are] more willing to believe a person that they have no idea about instead of a whole community, a worldwide community, of doctors. And this is really depressing to me because we're in 2022 [and] we should be open about that and, most of all, we shouldn't make something that helps our health politic. A lot of people are confusing politics and the vaccine. I mean, we're still in between a pandemic — we're right through a pandemic; we're getting out, but we're still in it — so we should trust who can help us to get out of this pandemic. So no YouTubers, no streamers, no unknown people on Internet; we should trust doctors because they're studying the matter. They know what a virus is and they know how to fight it. They got together with other doctors around the world to solve the problem. Instead, all the other things are coming out. 'Oh, it's just for money.' 'Oh, it's a political thing.' 'Oh, they want to control us.' And I'm, like, how do they control you? You have this [lifts her smartphone]. You're writing on Facebook. They know your cellphone. They know where you live. They know what you eat. They know when you go to the bathroom. Yet again, you think that they're gonna be controlling you putting 5G with the vaccine. And I'm, like, 'Really? Really?'

"So the only thing that I can say is that it was very clear from the very beginning that the intent of the vaccine was to keep the bad symptoms down," Scabbia continued. "It wasn't intended to, 'You're never gonna get COVID.' Because they're still studying it.

"There is always an answer, a clear answer for very [anti]-vaxxer that I talk to. Yet again, they don't accept it. They like better to trust strangers or a fake study on a picture that everybody can manipulate. But no, [they think] it's easier to manipulate a whole community of doctors around the world [who] don't know each other."

Last month, LACUNA COIL entered the studio to begin recording "a very special project."

Back in June, Scabbia told Revolver that she and her bandmates didn't use the coronavirus downtime to work on new music. "We didn't want to force the fact that because we were home, we had to write music," she explained. "We always thought that to write music, you need to be inspired. And inspiration comes from the outside, comes from experiences that you have, things that you live. At least this is valid for us.

"Everything we do in a regular life, in a normal life enriches us and gives us input that we can put in our music," she said. "And also we like to write together. So, if Marco [Coti Zelati, bass] creates the basis of the music together with the other musicians in the band, then Andrea [Ferro, vocals] and I jump in with the lyrics and vocal lines. But we do that together. We need to enter in songwriting mode. So we didn't really like the fact that we had to write separately just because we have to put a record [together] because it's quarantine. Now we are starting to collect ideas 'cause we feel a little bit happier."

Scabbia continued: "We didn't want anything connected to the negativity of the pandemic… That's why I used my time to do something completely different. Because I know that what I did that it's completely different from what I usually do will make me start again to do what I did before with passion — with the same passion. I was just afraid that if I would have used all the downtime making music when I didn't really want to, it would have had a negative influence on me. And it would have been, like, 'I really don't want to do that.' And I also wanted to prove to myself that, yeah, music is main passion. I love what I do for a living, and I hope that I can do it until the day I die. But I also wanted to show myself that I can be capable of doing something else as well."

Last summer, LACUNA COIL released a new live album, "Live From The Apocalypse", via Century Media. The effort was recorded at the band's special September 2020 livestream event where LACUNA COIL performed its latest album, "Black Anima", in its entirety.