A singing teacher who may be the UK’s earliest long Covid patient has revealed her devastation at being forced to give up her job.

Barbara* first got Covid-19 symptoms on December 17, 2019, and has suffered a host of health problems since.

The 65-year-old, from Stockport, is still not back to her old self and is one of around 1.3 million Brits the Office for National Statistics believes are currently battling the debilitating condition.

Speaking exclusively to Metro.co.uk, the grandmother-of-four explained: ‘Sadly my singing and teaching days are over.

‘Who wants a singing teacher who can’t speak, only in a hoarse whisper, then has to stop a zoom lesson to go and cough yourself sick?’

She continued: ‘(I) cough and choke when I try to speak, and as for singing, well, forget it.

‘I have lost all my income and we are just living on my husband’s pension.’

The grandmother-of-four continued: ‘Singing is my life, I have sung since I can remember.

‘Now I can’t sing to my grandchildren – one of them asked me to sing for her again and I couldn’t… I haven’t sung at all for my youngest grandson.’

It is difficult to say for certain if Barbara did catch coronavirus, or if she might have been suffering from another health condition, like a different post-viral syndrome.

But in the unlikely event of the diagnosis ever being medically confirmed, Barbara’s story would shine a new light on the origin of the virus in the UK and who the country’s ‘patient zero’ might have been.

Despite no known cases in Stockport at the time, she is ‘pretty sure’ that she did have the virus – but admits she ‘can’t say 100% definitely it was Covid’.

Barbara says she only realised she ‘wasn’t alone’ when it came to the length of her illness after reading a Metro.co.uk story earlier this month.

The website spoke to three long Covid sufferers who had recently passed their second anniversary of living with the condition, including one who first got symptoms on Christmas Day 2019.

Nic Mitchell has gone on to experience various horrifying syptoms since staying at a Gatwick Airport hotel overnight on December 22, when she believes she came into contact with passengers from Wuhan, China, where the virus is thought to have originated.

By the 25th, she was unable to taste her Christmas lunch in St Lucia and went on to face organ damage, stroke and memory and hearing loss, amongst other symptoms.

That had been the earliest British long Covid case Metro.co.uk was aware of, until Barbara got in touch having read Nic and two other sufferers’ stories.

She wrote: ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for the article I have just read about long Covid. I am crying as I write this.

‘I am not alone. That is so important to me, and at last I find I am not alone.’

More than two years ago, Barbara had been the MC at a large carol concert in Stockport Town Hall, when she noticed having a ‘scratchy throat’.

The next day, she had a sore throat and told the dentist she had a cold coming on, leading the dentist to put a face mask on.

Barbara went home from the dental appointment feeling ‘really rough’, before spending the next three weeks in bed.

‘I was so poorly I can’t remember anything except coming to and crawling to the toilet and telling my husband to just go away and let me die’, she recalls.

Barbara lost weight, her sense of taste disappeared and she had no energy, leaving her struggling to ‘walk to the end of the drive’, when previously she enjoyed hiking.

She was not hospitalised, but longer-term, like many long Covid patients, Barbara says she ‘seemed to recover for a few weeks and then it was almost as if I was hit with a bulldozer.’

And like other sufferers, she was not been believed by her doctor – at least partly because her illness preceded testing being widely available in the UK and before the first cases were confirmed.

Long Covid was only recognised months after she became unwell.

The UK’s first official infection came in late January 2020, but experts have long suspected it was in the country much earlier.

Weeks before then, Barbara initially thought she just had a bad bout of flu and struggled at home over the festive period.

She adds that her GP was ‘not interested’ because her health appeared to be improving – slamming the service she has received as ‘absolutely useless’.

Barbara – whose skin disease lichen planus is considered an underlying health condition – adds that she cannot get a referral to a long Covid clinic because she never tested positive.

But after 10 months of suffering, she says lemon drizzle cake ‘never tasted so good’ in autumn 2020, when her sense of taste finally returned.

Her health has improved somewhat, but she says she is only at 30% – 50% of her old self.

That has left her considering moving to a bungalow because stairs have become a daily struggle.

‘I have almost reached the point where I think I am not going to get better’, she explained.

‘I haven’t lived – I have existed, for two years… and every day is precious in your 60s.’

One unusual symptoms is a lump that has been on the left side of her throat ‘on and off’ since the infection, which has left her struggling to swallow.

She gets violent coughing bouts when she tries to swallow food, so is forced onto a diet of ‘watery soup and custard’, when the lump resurfaces.

The MP leading the parliamentary enquiry into coronavirus has told Metro.co.uk that long Covid patients are the ‘forgotten victims’ of the pandemic.

Layla Moran argued: ‘While there has been some progress in research and specialist clinics, the patchwork of rehabilitation services has created a postcode lottery, leaving too many struggling to access the support they need.’

The Department of Health says it is committed to supporting long Covid sufferers and ‘ensuring services are available to everyone who needs them’.

*Barbara’s name has been changed for personal reasons.

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