WITNESS TO A PANDEMIC

Healthcare worker Leonie Scholtz has created a harrowing documentary about life and death on a Covid ward

- NASIFA SULAIMAN

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 frontline 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 records of all the world wars, the fighting in the trenches, the Holocaust – this virus was the new frontline. Who was going to record this? Who was going to show the public and the people who thought it was a hoax or ‘just bad flu’ that it was a major catastrophe?

“Photographers weren’t allowed in hospitals anywhere, so that’s why I started doing what I did,” she says

And that was recording scenes deep down in the trenches. The result is Zero to Zero, a new documentary that gives harrowing insight into the effect of the pandemic from the perspective of healthcare workers, patients and their families at the Zuid-Afrikaans Hospital in Pretoria.

Leonie, a keen part-time photographer, felt obliged to document the pandemic when it hit South Africa.