The federal government has systematically shortchanged communities with large Black populations in the distribution of billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief aid meant to help hospitals struggling to manage the effects of the pandemic, according to a recently published study. "We are finding large-scale racial bias in the way the federal government is distributing" the funds to hospitals, said Ziad Obermeyer, a physician and a co-author of the study from the University of California, Berkeley. "If you take two hospitals getting the same amount of funding under the CARES Act, the dollars have to go further in Black counties than they do elsewhere," he said. "Effectively that means there are fewer things the health systems can do in those counties, like testing, buying more personal protective equipment, or doing outreach to make sure people are being tested."

Black people and Latinos are far more likely than white people in Los Angeles and statewide to report that the coronavirus has threatened their health, their jobs and their finances, a new poll shows - underscoring the degree to which the pandemic has widened existing racial and class inequities. Nearly 7 in 10 Latino and Black voters in Los Angeles County said that the virus posed a "major threat" to their personal or family health, according to the poll from UC Berkeley's Institute for Governmental Studies. About 6 in 10 Asian American voters said the virus was a major threat. By comparison, fewer than half of white voters reported the same level of concern.For more on this, see the press release at the Institute of Governmental Studies.

A profile of UC Berkeley professor of public health, Eva Harris, who has spent her career doing groundbreaking research on mosquito-transmitted dengue and building a scientific infrastructure in Latin America.

For 18 years, UC Berkeley epidemiologists have worked with local residents to study the physical effects of chemicals used in Salinas Valley homes and in agriculture. "Agriculture is different everywhere in California, but a lot of the pesticides and the pesticide mixtures being used are similar," said Kim Harley, the study's lead scientist and an associate adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. Harley said the study found higher pesticide levels in the study bracelets of girls who lived near agricultural fields, but also concluded that the simple acts of placing a doormat at the entrance to homes and cleaning homes more frequently resulted in lower pesticide levels. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Researchers at UC Berkeleyestimate that the costs of testing for the novel coronavirus and treating confirmed COVID-19 cases across California already has topped $2.4 billion and some Bay Area counties are enduring the state's highest per-capita costs. Without a vaccine, the statewide cost of COVID-19 now stands at roughly six times that of treating the flu every year and could pass $25 billion before California reaches "herd immunity," the researchers estimate. Herd immunity occurs when 60 percent or more of a population has been infected and is immune. The study, "What are the Health Care Costs of COVID-19 in California?: State and County Estimates," was released by UC Berkeley's Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

The risk of heart disease increases significantly for those who regularly suffer from fitful sleep, finds a new study by Berkeley researchers. The researchers believe that the key reason could be that fragmented sleep increases inflammation in the body, and inflammation is known to raise a person's risk for atherosclerosis and stroke. "Improving sleep may offer a novel way to reduce inflammation and thus reduce the risk of atherosclerosis," says psychology and neuroscience professor Matthew Walker, director of Berkeley's Center for Human Sleep Science, one of the study's co-authors. The study evaluated the sleep quality of more than 1,600 adults using two common sleep evaluation tools -- lab-based polysomnography and actigraphy, a movement detector worn on the wrist over several nights -- as well as measurements of the blood cell counts of two types of white blood cells known to raise inflammation. "These findings may help inform public health guidelines that seek to increase the continuity of sleep as a way to improve health and decrease the burden of heart disease on society," Professor Walker says. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic appeared in dozens of sources around the world, including Forbes, Medical News (Australia), Yahoo! Style (UK), Eurasia Review, Medical Dialogues (India), Telegraph (UK), and Retail Pharmacy Magazine.

Pregnant women living within a kilometer for active oil wells are 40% more likely to give birth to low birth weight babies compared to women who live further away, according to a paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives by a team led by Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental health and justice researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Babies born to women who live near active oil and gas wells in rural California are 40% more likely to have low birthweights, finds a new, first-of-its-kind study by UC researchers. The finding did not hold up for urban areas, including significant portions of the Los Angeles area, but public health and environmental science, policy, and management professor Rachel Morello-Frosch, the study's senior author, says, "I don't think it means that urban people don't have to worry." It's possible, she says, that the link to low birthrates exists there, but that it's less noticeable because oil and gas may comprise a smaller share of overall pollution in those areas. The timing of the study is significant because California is considering new legislation concerning future oil exploration in the state. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Other stories on this topic have appeared in the Guardian, Bloomberg News, and HealthDay.

A 2016 survey found that in California alone nearly a fifth of registered nurses were Filipino, and today the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting their prevalence on the frontlines. Ethnic studies professor Catherine Ceniza Choy wrote a book about the history of Filipino nurses, called Empire of Care, in which she connects their arrival in the U.S. to early-20th-century American colonialism in the Philippines. The colonizing started in 1898, she says, and it introduced an educational system that taught English and trained nurses, many of whom were brought to the U.S. after World War II to address a critical nursing shortage. "And they have continued to come, especially when there are crises," she says. For more on this topic, see our story at Berkeley News.

Dr. Eva Harris, a public health professor specializing in infectious diseases and vaccinology and Dr. Lisa Barcellos, a public health professor specializing in epidemiology and biostatistics, are co-leading an extensive study of the Bay Area's exposure to the virus to see how widespread it has been and for how long. On this program, they discuss their strategy, which includes a mailed questionnaire, followed up with testing. Dr. Harris says they've mailed 307,000 invitations to participate in the study to "every single home, every household in the census track in 11 cities." Dr. Barcellos says: "We're asking all about current symptoms, past symptoms and going back as far as December. We're asking about travel histories. We're asking about who's in the household and what they've been exposed to." From the respondents, 5,000 to 6,000 will be selected randomly to participate in the testing phase. "The in-home collection kits include all the materials that someone needs to collect saliva, as well as an oral and nasal swab," Dr. Barcellos says. "It's really very straightforward and doesn't hurt at all," Dr. Harris adds. Link to video. Read more about the study at Berkeley's School of Public Health.

As jurisdictions plan reopening while COVID-19 still presents a threat, antibody testing to see the extent of exposure and possible immunity will be critical, but studies can and have been found to be flawed, so it's important to get the testing right. Dr. Eva Harris, a public health professor specializing in infectious diseases and vaccinology, is co-leading an extensive study of the Bay Area's exposure to the virus over time. Noting that not all so-called seroprevalence studies are created equal, she says it's important to be clear about that when discussing the implications of different studies' findings. Her study will monitor how seroprevalence and the number of asymptomatic infections in the community respond to changes in COVID-19 mitigation strategies. "I think that it's really important that many places do seroprevalence studies -- I'm super supportive of that," she says. "I also think it's incredibly important that people understand the limitations" of individual studies, she adds. "The study design and the test used and the interpretation have to be transparent to the [scientific] community, and there has to be some way to communicate that to the public." Read more about her study at Berkeley's School of Public Health. Another story mentioning this study appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Assistant bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu, an investigator at Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) is co-leading a massive UC Berkeley-UCSF joint effort to study more than 120 antibody test kits for their effectiveness in identifying people who may be immune to COVID-19. "These tests are widely available, and many people are buying and deploying them, but I realized that they had not been systematically validated, and we needed to figure out which ones would really work," Professor Hsu says. "This is a huge, unmet need for public health." Praising the project's enormous team of researchers, he says: "This is a huge, huge community effort. ... A lot of people really came together. One of the things I think is cool about this study is how many people repurposed themselves from what we normally do to respond to this pandemic." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including Yahoo! News and Science Blog.

A new analysis using COVID-19 death data from Italy projects that the fatality rate in New York City can be no less than 0.5, or one out of every 200 infected people. The researchers, from UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also estimated, based on the predicted fatality rate, that roughly a quarter of New York City's population has been infected, and that about 26 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in New York will be among people who are younger than 65. "Our observation suggests COVID-19 kills the weakest segments of the population," says physics and astronomy professor Uros Seljak, the study's senior author. "Some of my colleagues think that we have been overly conservative, which might be true," he adds. "We have just accounted for the people who have died up until today, but people are still dying." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

For the past few weeks, more than 50 scientists have been working diligently to do something that the Food and Drug Administration mostly has not: Verifying that 14 coronavirus antibody tests now on the market actually deliver accurate results, this reporter writes, speaking of tests co-led by assistant bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu, an investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a joint research collaboration between Berkeley and UCSF that is focused on CRISPR gene-editing technology. The team has found that only 3 of the 14 leading blood antibody tests they tested provided consistently reliable results, and even those three were flawed. The results are especially troublesome for their rate of false-positive results. I realized, 'Gosh this is really the Wild West,'" Professor Hsu says. "We needed to figure out which of these would really work." The accuracy of antibody tests is particularly important as states consider how they'll reopen safely, because they are critical for determining who is immune and would be safe to return to work. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including U.S. News & World Report and KPIX TV--link to video.

Many lethal viruses are believed to have originated with, or been transmitted through, different species of bats, and that has raised scientific interest in whether or not there's something about the creatures that encourages viruses that are likely to jump species barriers to evolve inside them. One recent study, co-authored by postdoctoral fellow Cara Brook, suggests a possible reason. Some bats have unusual immune systems, with an antiviral process called the interferon pathway that is always active, not just triggered by an infection. Through a series of experiments on bat cells that do and do not have this pathway, as well as on monkey cells that were used as a control, the researchers concluded that always-on interferon pathways likely speed viral evolution, making bats more abundant sources of virulent new viruses than other groups of mammals. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

A new Berkeley initiative, set to begin in early May and possibly continuing through the year, will test a large and representative sample of healthy East Bay residents to see if they have been exposed to the COVID-19 coronavirus. The tests will solicit saliva, swab and blood samples from volunteers between the ages of 18 and 60. The initiative addresses one of the key challenges faced in lifting physical distancing policies, since it's critical to know the full extent of viral spread with a disease that may be carried and spread by infected people without symptoms. "We're very excited about this ... We're going to follow people over time," says Dr. Eva Harris, a public health professor specializing in infectious diseases and vaccinology who is co-leading the project. Dr. Lisa Barcellos, a public health professor specializing in epidemiology and biostatistics, is co-leading the team. She says: "Our research is the first study in the Bay Area to identify and test a large, representative population of asymptomatic individuals, which will provide much-needed insight into transmission dynamics, the true extent of the community spread, and risk factors for infection beyond those tested for COVID-19 at hospitals and clinics." Other stories on this topic appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and San Francisco Chronicle Online. For more on this, see this story at the School of Public Health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the widespread lack of paid sick in the U.S. According to this reporter, only 4% of all American workers have 14 or more days off a year, and a new study from Berkeley and UCSF has found that 60% of 100,000 service and retail workers surveyed around the U.S. have reported going to work sick. The study, which was part of the "Shift Project," was co-authored by assistant sociology professor Daniel Schneider. Calling the results "really scary," co-author Kristen Harknett of UCSF notes that corporations with more than 500 workers are some of the worst offenders, and these businesses are exempt from the federal coronavirus stimulus bill. The full report is available at the Shift Project.

It's more expensive to build government-subsidized apartment complexes for low-income residents in California than anywhere else in the U.S., and yet job losses connected with the coronavirus pandemic will likely send demand for affordable housing soaring. According to associate city and regional planning professor Carolina Reid, faculty research advisor for Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation and the author of a new study on the topic, the economic impact of the crisis is also likely to significantly lower government tax revenue, in turn reducing the amount of money available to fund new construction. It will also increase the need to overhaul how low-income housing is built in the state. "If you look at how we build affordable housing, every single one of the actors in it, from cities to developers to construction workers, is going to face stress from the coronavirus for years," she says. "This public health crisis adds more urgency to making the reforms we had already needed." Link to Professor Reid's study at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. A story about the data collection for this story also appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

The robotic COVID-19 testing lab that's coalescing on the Berkeley campus under the auspices of molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna and the campus's Innovative Genomics Institute, aims to provide critically needed COVID-19 coronavirus testing with rapid 12-to-24-hour turnaround. The lab will process samples from the Tang Center, the university's health services facility, and other medical centers around the East Bay. Professor Doudna co-invented the revolutionary gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas-9. She says: "The expertise in our institute and in our community can address this public health emergency through the kind of coordination we are uniquely capable of." Normally, a lab like this would take months or years to establish, but this team has accomplished the feat in just a couple of weeks. "It's really extraordinary and not something I've ever seen in my career," she says. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources.

A "dream team" of researchers from Berkeley and several other universities -- including the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Princeton, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon -- is working on a new $367 million public-private research consortium with the artificial intelligence firm C3.ai to find A.I. solutions to global problems. The first goal of the Digital Transformation Institute, managed jointly by Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will be targeting ways to slow the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. "AI is the perfect weapon to point at this problem and say, 'How can we contain this thing before it overwhelms us,'" says Thomas M. Siebel, the founder and chief executive of C3.ai, who is backing the project along with Microsoft Corp. "All of the work that's being done goes into the public domain. It will be available to everybody in the world under nonexclusive royalty free licensing." Stories on this topic have appeared in more than 400 sources around the world, including The Scientist.

A robotic pop-up lab, to be directed by molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene editing technology, is ramping up to provide critically needed COVID-19 coronavirus testing on the Berkeley campus, as early as next week. With academic and industry researchers collaborating on the project, the 2,500-square-foot laboratory will serve the Bay Area, processing more than 1,000 samples a day. Later, if the need is there, they hope to be able to process 3,000 a day. "When the pandemic hit and the range of infections went as high as it did, we realized there is a skill that we have that can be rapidly repurposed for the national good," says molecular and cell biology professor Fydor Urnov, director of technology at Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute. "Where the robots come in is taking the best tools available today and not relying on what's being traditionally done. ... Taking one patient sample and running it through the system will take four hours, but that is not useful. The question is how long can you turn around a thousand," he adds. Link to video. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including the San Francisco Chronicle (1), San Francisco Chronicle (2), Medgadget, BioSpace, Robot Report, NBC Bay Area Online, Fox 40 Sacramento (link to video), and KPIX TV (link to video). Professor Doudna was interviewed on PBS's Amanpour & Co. (link to video) and CNN (link to transcript).

Molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene editing technology, is leading a team of academic and industry researchers in setting up a testing site for the COVID-19 coronavirus. Using a 2,500-square-foot laboratory, they will serve the Bay Area, processing more than 1,000 samples a day. Later, if the need is there, they hope to be able to process 3,000 a day. "This is a big, big issue here in the U.S.," Professor Doudna says. "We need to ramp up testing very fast. It's been problematic for various reasons. And so we are building and implementing a clinical testing laboratory on the UC Berkeley campus to do exactly that. ... It's unbelievable to see how fast this is coming together and people writing software just overnight to put such a complicated pipeline in place and ensure that it's secure." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Another story on this topic appeared in Berkeleyside.

A recent study of chemical exposure among women firefighters in San Francisco has identified three types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that are present at elevated levels in firefighters compared to nearby office workers, heightening the firefighters' risk of breast and other types of cancer. Only about 5% of American firefighters are women, and because of their small numbers, they're often neglected in studies of firefighting health risks. "Having a large group of women in San Francisco and interest from the community to answer these questions -- that's why (this study is) important," says doctoral public health student Jessica Trowbridge, the study's lead author. "Their exposure and risk has not been characterized in the scientific literature." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.