As chair-person of California's COVID-19 Scientific Safety Review Workgroup, UC Berkeley professor of epidemiology and biostatistics Arthur Reingold and his team of health experts are tasked with double checking the work of the FDA and CDC and either assuring residents that the new vaccines are safe or rejecting the new drugs if they find a problem.

Three UC Berkeley health experts discuss recent reports of employee COVID-19 infections at Berkeley Bowl, Whole Foods and other local businesses. "As long as customers are wearing a mask and staying more than six feet away from employees (who should also be wearing masks), they should be safe," said UC Berkeley public health professor John Swartzberg. UC Berkeley public health professor Arthur Reingold seconded Swartzberg's assessment of indoor transmission, adding that stores with infected employees should communicate with Berkeley's Public Health Division to decide appropriate cleaning procedures and whether to close. "Transmission is mostly a risk with prolonged indoor contact, and much less likely with brief customer-employee encounters," Reingold said. "There might be a better case to be made about possible transmission to other employees who interact frequently in the store." UC Berkeley public health professor Malcolm Potts stressed the importance of following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines in order to prevent COVID-19's spread. Potts also believes that Alameda County and the Berkeley Public Health Division should follow California Gov. Gavin Newsom's guidance regarding business closures.

Doctors Art Reingold and John Swartzberg, public health professors at Berkeley, are among a number of the "top minds in their fields" profiled for this story on Bay Area experts who are working tirelessly to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Reingold, director of the CDC-funded California Emerging Infections Program and head of Berkeley's epidemiology and biostatistics departments, is working with the state and Bay Area counties to coordinate their responses to the pandemic, and he's also launching a study to test hospital patients with pneumonia to see if they're infected with the virus. While he expects there to be a vaccine for COVID-19 eventually, he says: "I don't think anybody who knows about infectious diseases will be surprised if (COVID-19) became seasonal." Dr. Swartzberg, a professor emeritus, is sharing his infectious-disease expertise with the media to assure the public receives accurate information. "It's critical that we have a voice because we're living in a very anti-science era," he says. He's spending as many as 14 hours a day learning everything he can about COVID-19 and sharing that information with the media. "Although we don't know nearly what we need to know, we have learned an enormous amount in just two months," he says. "I don't think the public realizes what an important role journalism plays." Speaking of how the unprepared and underequipped the U.S. was for this crisis because of decades of underfunded public health programs, he says: "It's really been a horrific thing to see. ... We've learned a lot about what happens to society when we fail to fund public health." Dr. Swartzberg was also quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle (1) and San Francisco Chronicle (2), U.S. News & World Report, Mercury News (1), Mercury News (2), Yahoo! News and California EPeak.