Fellows
Agness Nhidza-Manjoro
SANTHE Post-doctoral Fellow
Collaborative Clinical Research Centre (CCRC), Harare, Zimbabwe
Post COVID-19 Syndrome: Inflammatory Indicators in a cohort of recovered COVID-19 patients to assess the role of continued Inflammatory process amongst SARS-CoV-2 infection survivors
Agness Nhidza, born and raised in Zimbabwe, studied her PhD in Medical Microbiology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa, focussing on immune responses to asymptomatic enteric pathogens. She is currently employed as a Quality Systems Manager/ Senior Laboratory Scientist by the Biomedical Research and Training Institute in Harare, Zimbabwe, and is now interested in understanding immunology of infectious diseases such as in long COVID. Her Post-doctoral studies focus on establishing a cohort of individuals that have been, or are, exposed to COVID-19 and will be followed up over time to study their immune responses to disease and post disease. Nhidza would like to investigate the possibility of using inflammatory markers as predictive tools to identify patients most likely to suffer from long COVID. A predictor tool that identifies patients likely to suffer from long COVID-19 will impact patient management plans and improve time to recovery and survival. The output from this study will also inform the development of diagnostic tools to quickly diagnose/exclude long COVID-19 and improve clinical management of post-COVID patients.