'I'm an artist but long Covid has made my face blindness even worse - sometimes I even struggle to recognise friends'

A renowned illustrator has told how long Covid has left him struggling 'face blindness' - and even finds it difficult to recognise friends. Stanley Chow has long had difficulties remembering faces, but says the memory fog has become much worse since catching coronavirus over two years ago.

The 48-year-old, from Manchester, has 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' a friend when he failed to recognise them.

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“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.’”

Mr Chow, whse work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, 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. 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