A 2006 Tutu Fellow, Wendy Burgers, is leading research into reinfection of patients by COVID-19. She had noticed that globally, a handful of patients had reportedly been reinfected with COVID. She thought it was important to discover and understand how the immune system responds to the virus and whether it provides previously infected patients with a level of protection, should they be re-exposed to the virus.
Wendy is a viral immunologist and Associate Professor in the Division of Medical Virology in the Department of Pathology in University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Faculty of Health Sciences. Wendy and her team partnered with a healthcare worker study in UCT’s Department of Medicine, which involves regular sampling of a group of healthcare workers who have a high risk of exposure to the virus but who had already been infected with COVID-19. It also used a group of their peers who had not.
