Covid-19 getting in your hair?

Hair loss is common after getting Covid-19. Here is what you can do

- Louisa Lim

When Ms Nina Tan, 32, found that she was losing her hair at an alarming rate in early 2022, she was bewildered. The local influencer searched high and low for a cure, but nothing seemed to work.

Chalking it up to stress, she posted some pictures and wrote: "Really want to document my new botak-ness. Introducing three bald spots on my head that send chills down my spine whenever there is a cold breeze."

Ms Tan's story went viral after it was picked up by several news outlets. She was surprised to find herself inundated with "hundreds of messages" from followers and supporters who were going through the same problem.

"Many of them told me they had lost their hair after falling ill with Covid-19. I, too, had just recovered from Covid-19 for several weeks before my hair began to fall out," she says.

Covid-19 is commonly characterised by a persistent cough and a mild fever. But some have also reported losing their hair after being infected. This phenomenon known as Covid-related hair loss has been well documented in several medical journals around the world.

A 2022 peer-reviewed study conducted in Saudi Arabia showed that 52.7 per cent of 806 participants experienced hair loss after Covid-19 infection. Meanwhile, a more recent study published in peer-reviewed medical journal Nature Medicine analysed the electronic health records of 2.4 million people in Britain from January 2020 to April 2021 and found that hair loss was one of the more than 60 symptoms associated with long Covid.

In Singapore, the founder of herbal hair care centre TwoHerbs, Mr Riff Lim, 38, has noticed an increase in the number of patients seeking help for hair loss since the pandemic began.

"These days, we usually encounter customers with Covidrelated hair loss. several times a week," he says. One of them is property agent Clarence Tan, who began losing his hair a month or two after contracting Covid-19.