WITNESS TO A PANDEMIC

SHE remembers all their faces: Patient Zero, the schoolteacher from Brits who was the hospital’s first Covid patient. The young woman who fought for her life, fear flooding her eyes. And the couples who arrived together and were intubated together.

Pretoria-based radiologist Professor Leonie Scholtz is one of countless front-line healthcare workers who’ve been waging war on the pandemic since it arrived on our shores. She’s watched it change from the first wave, when mostly older people were affected, to ravaging younger people in the second and third waves, leaving death and devastation in its wake.

And Leonie (64) felt something needed to be done to show just how serious it was.

“We’ve got