An illustrator has revealed how long Covid has left him struggling to remember faces in what has been dubbed "face blindness".
Stanley Chow has long had difficulties remembering faces, but says the memory fog has become much worse since catching the virus over two years ago.
The 48-year-old from Manchester opened up on his experiences with the condition, about which little is still known.
Stanley regularly "blacks out" bumping into acquaintances, and said he was even accused of "blanking out" a friend when he failed to recognise them.
“That unsettled me for a few weeks,” Mr Chow told The Guardian.
“I always make an excuse, like: ‘Since Covid I can’t remember faces as well as I could.’”
Like thousands, Mr Chow caught coronavirus in early 2021 and swiftly recovered, but was left with many symptoms that continue to affect his everyday life.
An estimate two million Brits are currently living with long Covid according to the most recent data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), with symptoms ranging from brain fog, chronic fatigue and, like Mr Chow, prosopagnosia - or "face blindness".
Of those, some 400,000 have symptoms so bad they require specialist care, The Mirror revealed last month.
A recent study published by scientists at Dartmouth College in the US found one woman, named only as Annie, developed such bad prosopagnosia as a long Covid symptom that she was unable to recognise members of her own family.
The 28-year-old - whose job as a portrait artist has been affected - caught Covid in March 2020 and suffered a symptom relapse two months later.
“It was as if my dad’s voice came out of a stranger’s face,” Annie told researchers, revealing she has been relying on voice recognition to get by.
Despite being a rare case and Annie undergoing further tests to ensure she hadn't suffered from a stroke, she is not the only person to report the bizarre symptom.
“Anyone I’ve spoken to once or twice I do forget quite instantly,” Stanley added.
“If I meet someone new, I’ll make a point of following them on Instagram or Facebook so their face becomes ingrained in my memory somehow.”
Face blindness is not an uncommon condition on its own, affecting one in 33 people according to a recent study on Americans carried out by Harvard University.
Many cases are thought to be triggered by Alzheimer's or forms of brain trauma or damage, including encephalitis which is a swelling of the brain tissue.
Professor Brad Duchaine, co-author of the Dartmouth study, said: “It’s been known that there are broad cognitive problems that can be caused by Covid-19, but here we’re seeing severe and highly selective problems in Annie.”
“[A]nd that suggests there might be a lot of other people who have quite severe and selective deficits following Covid.”
