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.