William Dow

If California had stockpiled enough masks and other protective equipment, at least 15,800 essential workers would not have contracted COVID-19, and the state would have saved $93 million weekly on unemployment claims, according to a UC Berkeley Labor Center report issued this week. "It was one shocking number after another as I looked at this," said report co-author William Dow, a professor of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. "Based on these numbers, we should be building a stockpile for the future."

An analysis of death data from 1999-2015 suggests that raising the minimum wage and earned-income tax credit by 10 percent could prevent about 1,230 suicides -- or "deaths of despair" -- a year in the U.S. The national suicide rate has risen 35 percent since 2000, and the researchers found that the rates fell in states that increased their minimum wage or the tax credit for working class families. "When they implement these policies, suicides fall very quickly," says study co-author Anna Godoey, a labor economist and postdoctoral scholar at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The study was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. Co-authors included economics professor Michael Reich, chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, public-health professor William Dow, and doctoral public health student Christopher Lowenstein. For more on this, see our story at Berkeley News. Other stories on this topic appeared in Forbes, New York Magazine, and Business Insider UK.

San Francisco's Paid Parental Leave Ordinance, enacted at the beginning of 2017, has led to more of the city's fathers taking "bonding" leave after the birth of a child, according to an analysis led by Interim Public Health Dean William Dow. The researchers found that in the first half of 2017, 28 percent more men took the leave, compared to the first half of 2016; and the increase among women was 6 percent.