When 28-year-old Annie contracted COVID-19 in March 2020, she likely followed the same steps as most others with the diagnosis: isolate, rest, recover. But when her symptoms returned two months later, they brought with them a startling and scary new development.
Something was “off with faces”, Annie told the authors of a new study, published in the journal Cortex, about her relapse into long Covid – which came to a head when Annie attended a family get-together in June that same year and couldn’t recognise her own father.
“My dad’s voice came out of a stranger’s face,” the customer service representative and part-time portrait artist told researchers, adding that she wasn’t able to tell him apart from her uncle – and now relies heavily on her memory of strangers’ voices to identify people.
When Covid first hit, neurological symptoms such as loss of smell and taste, brain fog and attention deficits were widely reported. Now, this new research suggests that prosopagnosia – aka an inability to recognise people’s faces – may be affecting people who are suffering from long Covid.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to people Annie knows, either, with the 28-year-old telling study authors she also has difficulty recognising celebrities’ faces and “equates looking at and then trying to remember faces to viewing a Chinese character without any knowledge of the language, and then being asked to reproduce it from memory,” write the authors.
Annie has also had trouble with navigation, she shared, explaining she would find herself getting lost in the grocery store, forgetting where she parked and driving in the opposite direction of where she intended to go.
Scary new Covid symptom
“Previous studies of the long-term effects of COVID-19 have reported deficits in memory, attention, and concentration that substantially impair everyday functioning,” write study authors Marie-Luise Kieseler and Brad Duchaine.
But “in addition to the well-known broad impairments, COVID-19 sometimes causes severe selective impairments like prosopagnosia”.
The specific combination of facial blindness and navigational deficits “caught our attention because the two deficits often go hand in hand after somebody either has had brain damage or developmental deficits,” explained Prof. Duchaine.
And Annie wasn’t the only subject in the study to display visual/perceptual and cognitive difficulties as a result of long Covid – though she was the only subject to suffer facial blindness specifically. Most of the people surveyed for the study reported major deficits in their ability to identify people and objects, recognise voices, remember phone numbers and understand what they read.
Long Covid is characterised by ongoing persistent symptoms that can last for weeks or even months following COVID-19 infection, with around 5-10% of COVID-19 cases in Australia reporting symptoms that lasted for more than three months. The most common symptoms of long Covid are extreme fatigue, shortness of breath and problems with memory and concentration (‘brain fog’), along with cough, joint, muscle or chest pain, a change in taste or smell, and mood-related issues such as anxiety.
However, the new research suggests “there might be a lot of other people who have quite severe and selective deficits following Covid”, said Dr Duchaine.
