Not a trace of coronavirus fatigue.

Matthias Egger’s phone call in late March still sticks out in her mind. “Everything happened so fast,” she says, her coffee still untouched on the desk in front of her. “He asked if I was interested in leading the Expert Group. I said yes and sent him some details of my qualifications — and then boom, I found myself right in the midst of the action. The first video conference was held the next evening.” Since then, she has tried to give her best to the role. Egger gave up his mandate at the Task Force in July. Looking back, he says: “She was an extremely lucky choice.”

Sarah Tschudin Sutter, a petite woman of 44, is wearing her blond hair tied up in a knot. If you didn’t know better, you might mistake her for a student, but she is a tenacious and respected professor who frequently puts in 100-hour weeks. Manuel Battegay, head of her department and Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, is constantly impressed by the intensity and effi ciency of Tschudin Sutter’s work: “She has the characteristics of a leader,” he says. Apparently, of the 500 residents he has supervised over the decades, she is one of the best.

Then came the career

By her own admission, she wasn’t originally striving for an academic career. “During my studies,” she says, “my only aim was to become a good, clinically active physician specializing in infectious diseases and internal medicine. I hadn’t thought any further than that.” Then, you could almost say that her career found her: during her specialist training at University Hospital Basel, she realized how much she enjoyed infectiology and interdisciplinary work, including in the intensive care unit, where she primarily looked after patients with complex infections.

She discovered the joys of scientific work and began to research multidrug-resistant pathogens and the way they spread inside hospitals. After becoming the head of a research group at the University of Basel in 2015 and receiving a professorship in 2018, she realized she had a fl air for hospital epidemiology. “Unlike clinical work, which is obviously very patient-centric, it’s more about organizational strategies and measures to prevent germs from spreading.” Tschudin Sutter has published several studies on the subject, which have also made their way into practice.

An incredible time

Over the last few months, however, she has of course been forced to scale back her research activities in order to turn her attention to the all-consuming issue of the day: Covid-19. What has been her experience of recent developments?

She removes her face mask for a moment to take a sip of her coff ee, which has by now probably gone cold. It’s been incredible, she says — “more intense and fastpaced than anything I’ve ever experienced before.” The early days of the pandemic were particularly challenging: with the situation developing rapidly and shocking reports emerging from northern Italy, case numbers were also rising in Ticino. Eventually, the first coronavirus patients were also admitted to the University Hospital in Basel. “We worked tirelessly to prepare the hospital to cope with a surge of patients. At the same time, we were looking at the pictures coming out of Bergamo and asking ourselves: What if we’re hit just as badly? How on earth will we cope?”

Her thoughts often turn to those days in February and March, but the difficult moments are also interspersed with many pleasant memories that have stuck in her mind: the solidarity expressed at the hospital, the close interaction with people she wouldn’t otherwise have met, the novel experience of communicating via digital platforms, the pooling of research findings from all corners of the world.

Not to mention the quick coffee breaks with her husband, who is a neurologist and intensive care physician working as a senior consultant at the ICU. “We both work long hours,” says Tschudin Sutter, “so it’s nice if we’re able to cross paths now and then.”

Following a breather over summer, the University Hospital is now preparing itself for the colder time of year. Coronaviruses can spread more rapidly in lower temperatures, as can the viruses responsible for influenza and other respiratory diseases. “The challenge is that the symptoms are very hard to distinguish from one another,” says Tschudin Sutter.

Moreover, the way that the various pathogens interact inside the body is yet to be fully clarified — for example, one question is whether it is possible to develop Covid-19 and flu at the same time. “What should our approach be to diagnosis? What should our approach be to hospital epidemiology? These are the plans we’re currently working on, and we’re drawing up a range of different scenarios.”

As the interview draws to a close, I ask her if it’s hard to cope with this level of uncertainty. The infectiologist laughs. “You just have to get stuck in and put plans in place,” she says — in the knowledge that things may well turn out differently.