An array of problems, including overcrowding, led to a surge of COVID-19 cases in California prisons in 2020-2021, says a new report co-authored by UC Berkeley professor Amy Lerman.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created a new COVID-19 therapeutic that could one day make treating SARS-CoV-2 infections as easy as using a nasal spray for allergies. Anders Näär, a professor of metabolic...

A new study of nearly 70,000 Covid patients in California demonstrates that Omicron causes less severe disease than other coronavirus variants.
The new research, posted online Tuesday, aligns with similar findings from South Africa, Britain and Denmark, as well as a host of experiments on animals. "It's truly a viral factor that accounts for reduced severity," said Joseph Lewnard, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
Compared with Delta, Omicron infections were half as likely to send people to the hospital. Out of more than 52,000 Omicron patients identified from electronic medical records of Kaiser Permanente of Southern California, a large health system, Dr. Lewnard and his colleagues found that not a single patient went on a ventilator during that time.

Many parents may be worried about the effect of screen time on their teen children's mental health. However, a team of researchers has found that teens who had positive online interactions were less lonely during the lockdown. This suggests that it's the quality, not the quantity of time spent online that matters when it comes to well-being. The lockdowns related to COVID-19 had teens cooped up in their homes for quite a long time. In Peru, for instance, strict lockdown in 2020 had tens of millions of people in their homes, with only one adult family member allowed to leave to complete errands, the University of California Berkeley noted in a news release. "Our findings support our hypothesis that how you spend your time on screens, and not how much time you spend online, is the best predictor of loneliness and well-being," the study's lead author, Dr. Lucía Magis-Weinberg of UC Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, said. "In light of this, teachers and parents might want to focus more on promoting positive online experiences for youth rather than limiting screen time." Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

The authors of a study based on an enormous randomized research project in Bangladesh say their results offer the best evidence yet that widespread wearing of surgical masks can limit the spread of the coronavirus in communities. The preprint paper, which tracked more than 340,000 adults across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh, is by far the largest randomized study on the effectiveness of masks at limiting the spread of coronavirus infections. The study's authors — led by principal investigators Jason Abaluck, Laura Kwong, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Berkeley's School of Public Health, Steve Luby, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Ashley Styczynski — are a globe-spanning team that includes researchers from Yale, Stanford and the Bangladeshi nonprofit GreenVoice.

Contracting COVID-19 while pregnant dramatically increases the risk that a woman will give birth before the normal 39-44 weeks of pregnancy. Babies born significantly before term are at higher risk of critical, life-long health problems. The probability of premature and very premature delivery is especially true for women with medical comorbidities including diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. These findings are detailed in a paper in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet Regional Health - Americas describing a new, large population study by researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and at the University of California San Diego, the Department of Family Health Care Nursing, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the University of California Berkeley, the Stanford University School of Medicine, and the University of California Davis.

According to the study, remote employees do in fact feel less engaged. The study is being done by audience engagement technology company, Emotive Technologies which conducted the behavioral-based in-depth survey of 395 workers at two time points, measuring both what drives their engagement and their current level of work engagement. The study is being conducted in partnership with academic institutions including Harvard, Columbia and UC Berkeley and includes a mix of gender and ethnicities while focusing on an average salary of $56,863.17 and an average age of 38.51 years.

A new study has found that changes in land use in Asia are inadvertently creating conditions ideally suited to the horseshoe bats that can carry coronavirus and which threaten to serve as "hotspots" for the disease's further transmission from animals to humans. The findings from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the Polytechnic University of Milan and the Massey University of New Zealand, which were published in the journal Nature, indicate that practices from settlement building, agricultural expansion, the fragmentation of forests and the construction of facilities for intensive livestock production could all be playing a role in keeping the threat of a fresh outbreak alive. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

As California's businesses reopen, a majority of state residents are in support of allowing entertainment venues to require proof that their patrons are vaccinated or have tested negative for COVID-19, and for some employers to require vaccinations of workers, according to a statewide poll conducted by UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies that was funded in part by The Times. "The findings show that even at this later stage, politics powerfully shapes the way that Californians think about vaccination and the reopening of society," said G. Cristina Mora, co-director of the Berkeley institute.

Researchers at University of Oxford and University of California at Berkeley have found a significantly higher risk of severe complications than previously known for pregnant women with COVID-19 and for their newborns. The statistical analysis for the study was conducted by researchers at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, led by Robert Gunier, an assistant researcher, and Stephen Rauch, a data analyst at Berkeley Public Health. "Luckily, we found that COVID-19 positive people who were asymptomatic had mostly similar outcomes to people that were COVID-19 negative," Gunier said.

Two California-bred coronavirus variants are about 20% more infectious than the original virus, according to a study published Tuesday by researchers at UCSF, UC Berkeley and the California Department of Public Health. Researchers said the variants emerged in California in May 2020. Between September and January, coronavirus cases caused by the variants increased from zero to more than 50%, suggesting increased transmissibility compared to the original coronavirus.

According to a report released this week by the Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus and UC Berkeley Occupational Health Program, lackluster COVID safety protocols in fast food restaurants in San Francisco continue to endanger their low-wage workers. Infection clusters of workers still toiling in public venues, such as janitors and home health care workers who are frequently subjected to people not wearing masks and strict observation of the number of people in small spaces, are worrisome. Almost one-third of low-wage workers had a "negative interaction with a coworker, customer or client who were not following COVID-19 guidelines," the report said. About half of restaurant workers experienced this.

Putting the oldest people near the front of the line for COVID-19 shots will save more lives and may extend their lifespan, too, researchers say. The new study findings challenge the view that older people should be lower on the list for shots because they have a shorter life expectancy, according to the team from the University of California, Berkeley. "Since older age is accompanied by falling life expectancy, it is widely assumed that means we're saving fewer years of life," said lead author Joshua Goldstein, professor of demography. "We show this to be mistaken...The age patterns of COVID-19 [death rates] are such that vaccinating the oldest first saves the most lives and, surprisingly, also maximizes years of remaining life expectancy." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Even in the richest countries in the world, the pandemic has devastated millions. Developing countries have faced the same challenges with far fewer resources to absorb them with. How have their people fared? A new paper aims to solve that problem in the most direct way possible — by surveying tens of thousands of people in developing countries about what COVID-19 has been like for them. The paper, co-authored by UC Berkeley's Edward Miguel gives us a new window into what it has been like to live through 2020 in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

In a mere five months, a modest, 1,200-square-foot "pop up" testing lab at the University of California, Berkeley, has been transformed into one of the country's only high-throughput facilities for measuring COVID-19 viruses in sewage water.  "When we test wastewater, we get information about a really large number of people with a very small number of samples, and we get information about asymptomatic infections," says Kara Nelson, who leads COVID-WEB and is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

In low-income countries, identifying people who have fallen on hard times due to the pandemic is no easy task. Governments don't have good data about who is poor. Togo turned to artificial intelligence: a computer program that dives into data to pinpoint pockets of poverty. The government partnered with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. charity GiveDirectly to use satellite imagery and mobile phone data to find citizens most in need. The program used mobile phone technology to quickly distribute $22 million in three monthly mobile phone payments to 600,000 citizens in urban parts of Togo: $20 for men and $22 for women.

How have school districts dealt with the coronavirus pandemic? David Kirp, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, has completed a new book, "Greater Expectations," about three school districts and how they have responded to the coronavirus pandemic. Kirp writes, "Man plans, God laughs, as the adage goes. COVID-19 affected every aspect of education, even as it affected every aspect of our lives. In an attempt to halt the spread of the virus, principals, superintendents and then governors closed the schools. The wave of closures began in late February 2020, and by the first week of May all but two states had ordered that schools be shut for the rest of the school year."

Researchers are eyeing another step in the virus-building pipeline: the generation of virus genes, before they are packaged into their protein capsules. Carlos Bustamante, a biophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is set on sabotaging a protein called polymerase, which copies the coronavirus's genome. "We are playing tug of war," Dr. Bustamante said. "Every time it moves, it has to pull us." The hope, he said, is to understand the tug well enough to design a drug that blocks the RNA-copying process.

Researchers trying to improve health care with artificial intelligence usually subject their algorithms to a form of machine med school. Software learns from doctors by digesting thousands or millions of x-rays or other data labeled by expert humans until it can accurately flag suspect moles or lungs showing signs of COVID-19 by itself. A study published this month took a different approach—training algorithms to read knee x-rays for arthritis by using patients as the AI arbiters of truth instead of doctors. The results revealed that radiologists may have literal blind spots when it comes to reading Black patients' x-rays. Ziad Obermeyer, an author of the study and a professor at the University of California Berkeley's School of Public Health, was inspired to use AI to probe what radiologists weren't seeing by a medical puzzle.

The COVID-19 virus can be picked up in wastewater before it's found in a clinical setting and researchers in a new study say this could be really useful for tracking new mutations of the virus, like the B.1.17 strain that is now widespread in the U.K. and has already been introduced in the U.S. "SARS CoV-2 virus is excreted by individuals that are infected by COVID-19 and the fecal waste ends up in the wastewater systems. By sampling wastewater, we can get information on infections for a whole population. Some wastewater systems serve several thousand people. Some serve hundreds of thousands of people," explained the study's lead author Kara Nelson, from the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.