Bay Area researchers believe a new device has the potential to ramp up the fight against COVID-19. It's designed to diagnose the virus in a fraction of the time, with the help of something you may have in your pocket. All it takes is a marriage of Nobel Prize-winning science and consumer electronics, namely, a cellphone. UC Berkeley bioengineer Dan Fletcher and colleagues at San Francisco's Gladstone Institute of Virology are working hard to develop a COVID-19 test, using a cellphone's camera and CRISPR biotechnology, that can detect the virus in 30 minutes or less. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

California's Santa Rita jail is in the midst of a second COVID-19 outbreak since the pandemic began. "We're testing people who come into the jail and then we're testing people two weeks after they've been in the jail," said spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly, noting that employees of the facility are screened on a regular basis, and everyone inside, including those incarcerated, have access to personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer. But Darby Aono, a second-year law student at UC Berkeley, believes much more could be done to improve safety inside the jail. Aono has been tracking COVID-19 cases in the jail since the pandemic began in March and says she's the only one making that data publicly available. "I should not be the one tracking it, Aono said. That's patently absurd, that some random law student is the one keeping track of people's lives — they matter so much more than that."

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.

Tapping the expertise of Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and medical smart-phone technology expert Dan Fletcher from UC Berkeley, researchers believe they're on the cusp of a point-of-care COVID test that would deliver results within 30 minutes. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

In two American breadbasket communities, Moorefield, W. Va., and Salinas, Calif.,, small farmers and ranchers have been left to improvise as their markets swivel and contract. In its early months considered an urban problem, the coronavirus has been especially brutal in rural agricultural communities, where farmworkers were slow to get personal protective equipment and effective safety protocols. A recent University of California, Berkeley study shows that 13% of Salinas Valley farmworkers tested positive for the virus between July and November, compared with about 3% of Californians overall. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

California's agricultural workers have contracted Covid-19 at nearly three times the rate of other residents in the state, a new study has found, laying bare the risks facing those who keep a $50 billion industry afloat. A study from the University of California, Berkeley is the first to explore the prevalence of infection rates among the workforce putting food on tables across America. "One of the main takeaways from this study is that the Latino population is not just disproportionately affected by high positivity rates, but they're also affected in the sense that they're vulnerable because a lot of them are going to work when sick because they're worried about losing their jobs and losing their pay," said the principle investigator Ana Maria Mora, an assistant researcher at the UC Berkeley Center for Environmental Research and Children's Health. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Somewhere between 750,000 and 1.6 million Californians will abruptly lose federal unemployment benefits at the end of December, unless Congress passes and the president signs a bill extending them, according to two reports issued this week. An analysis released Thursday by the California Policy Lab estimates that 750,000 Californians will no longer receive benefits when two programs created under the federal Cares Act expire Dec. 26. The policy lab estimates that 583,000 people, or 40% of those receiving PUA in October, will lose it at year's end. The other 60% will have found work or exited the program for other reasons before then, said Till von Wachter, faculty director at the California Policy Lab, a research center housed at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

The Bay Area's popular commuter corridors are also generators of carbon dioxide and micro pollutants. So what happened when COVID-19 forced most commuters off the road and into their homes? "...We saw this incredible change. The amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere in the Bay Area was 25% lower in that period than just before the lockdown six weeks before," says UC Berkeley professor Ron Cohen. "So we've been thinking about this as a model for the electric car." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. A story on this topic also appeared in Science Daily.

Even in this dark moment, as coronavirus cases surge to even more alarming levels and new lockdowns are imposed, there is a path forward to guide us out of this pandemic, experts say. What will life look like over the next year? UC Berkeley demographers Ronald Lee and Joshua Goldstein say the virus will shorten this country's average lifespan in 2020 by about a year. That's because older people, with fewer remaining years of life, represent the most fatalities, according to their research. But without interventions, they say, we could have lost five years. At universities, it's a mixed picture. Some campuses will try to bring students on campus. At UC Berkeley, the first two weeks will be fully remote but limited in-person instruction will start in February. Perhaps by next autumn, if our vaccine rollout is a success, life will feel safe enough to ease anxieties, rebuild relationships and start an unfettered restoration of the economy. "As we work to contain this epidemic," said UC Berkeley demographer Lee, "it is important to know that we have been through such mortality crises before." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

The University of California, Berkeley set up a temporary laboratory where it is testing sewage water to spot signs of COVID-19 in the San Francisco Bay Area. "From the very beginning of the pandemic, it was clear that there were major limitations to the ability to test every individual in a population frequently enough to find out whether they were infected or not," said Kara Nelson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "Wastewater naturally pools the waste from hundreds to even millions of people in a single sample, so if you can collect a representative sample of wastewater and analyze it, you can gain a tremendous amount of information that you likely couldn't gain through testing people individually." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Researchers at UC Berkeley are collecting and testing the wastewater of millions of Bay Area residents, with the hopes of being able to spot a possible coronavirus infection cluster before the virus spreads. "We hope that there is not an increase in infections and a third wave, but we're hopeful now that we have this wastewater monitoring tool available, that we will be ready if there is a third wave," said Kara Nelson, a professor in civil and environmental engineering who leads the research group. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have also appeared in the Mercury News, the Daily Californian, and on ABC-7, CBS Bay Area, and Fox News.

A conversation with UC Berkeley associate professor Carolina Reid, faculty research advisor for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, author of a new study reporting on coronavirus and housing insecurity. One out of five California households are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. "The data show that Californians are struggling to pay their rent and their mortgage. I do think that without significant intervention by the federal government, we will see heightened evictions and foreclosures next year. I think it will have profound implications not only for the housing market in California but also for the broader economic recovery."

Coronavirus tests performed in labs are the gold standard for accuracy, and antigen tests are a fast and inexpensive alternative. But backers of a third type of test, developed by a Nobel Prize winner using cutting-edge CRISPR technology, say it has the potential to be all three: rapid, accurate and inexpensive. Dr. Jennifer Doudna, a University of California, Berkeley researcher whose pioneering work in CRISPR earned a share of this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry, said the test can be done quickly and doesn't require a lab.  "We have a ways to go before CRISPR-based diagnostics reach widespread use, but I believe we'll see an impact during the current pandemic," Doudna said. "Because it is simple to adjust these tests to detect other targets, the platform we're developing now is laying the groundwork to deploy CRISPR for rapid diagnosis during future outbreaks."

In a normal year, the Work-Study program provides nearly $1.2 billion in help for more than 612,000 college students across the country. The federal government typically covers about 50% of the wages, and the institutions pay the rest. Many of those jobs were on campuses that have gone completely or mostly online during the pandemic, and colleges and universities have not been able to adapt all of them to this new reality. In a national survey conducted by The Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium at the University of California at Berkeley, 53% of low-income and working-class students said they had lost wages from on-campus jobs.

Only a quarter of California adults say they would definitely get a vaccine against COVID-19 if one were available today, a new survey found, an early warning of what could be problems in stemming the pandemic that already has killed more than 17,000 in the state. Black Americans have been the group least supportive of Trump, which could help to explain why so many are unwilling to accept his assurances about a vaccine. A September survey by UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies found that just 11% of likely Black voters in California backed Trump over Democrat Joe Biden, the lowest of any racial group.

Stubborn unemployment, a lengthening health crisis and California's high housing costs are putting unsustainable pressure on the state's most vulnerable homeowners and renters. More than 1 in 5 California residents surveyed said they lacked confidence they would be able to make rent or mortgage last month, according to new research by the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation. "It paints a really compelling picture about how broad-based the pandemic has hit," said Carolina Reid of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. In particular, renters are feeling growing anxiety about making their monthly payments.

The specificity of COVID-19 internal tracking and the method of reporting data to the public vary from school to school, much like symptoms vary from person to person. Some college campuses provide thorough, easy-to-access COVID-19 dashboards on their websites that are updated frequently. Others have dashboards that require a postgraduate degree to navigate. And some have no dashboards at all. So diverse is the range of COVID-19 reporting around the country that the situation spawned — what else? — a Twitter account: @CovidDashboards. It assigns a letter grade to university dashboards based on the range of data provided, the frequency of updates, the separation of student and staff data, the ease of use and several other categories. UC Berkeley received the highest grade - an A - among the University of California campuses that provide public data via dashboard. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Gov. Gavin Newsom's response to the COVID-19 pandemic helped put him in such good graces with California voters that his approval rating is among the highest of any governor in the past 50 years at the same point in their first term, according to a new poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. But the poll released Tuesday also shows that Newsom's popularity is being tempered by intense voter dissatisfaction over the Democratic governor's handing of homelessness in the state and California's high housing costs.

A recent study shows that rampant use of the "China virus" to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by conservative outlets, had a profound impact on how those in the United States see Asian Americans. "Research suggests that when people see Asian Americans as being more 'foreign,' they are more likely to express hostility toward them and engage in acts of violence and discrimination," said Rucker Johnson, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the study.

A UC Berkeley study has found several surprising insights on how COVID-19 is affecting India, a country of 1.3 billion people. The median hospital stay before death from the virus was five days, compared with two weeks in the United States, possibly because of limited access to health care. The trend in increasing deaths with age seemed to drop off after age 65, perhaps because Indians who live past that age tend to be relatively wealthy and have access to good health care. The study also found that children of all ages can become infected and spread the virus to others. An overwhelming majority of coronavirus cases globally have occurred in resource-poor countries, noted Joseph Lewnard, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. But most of the data has come from high-income countries. "It still surprises me that it took until this point for a lot of data to come out of a low- or middle-income country about the epidemiology of Covid," he said.

COVID-19 is especially hard on the old and frail, with 79% of the deaths attributed to the disease in the U.S. among those 65 and older and 94% among people with at least one "comorbidity" such as diabetes, dementia, obesity or hypertension. 2020 is likely to see big increases in overall mortality. Because of the age profile of the disease, though, the life expectancy decline would be less historic. In a study that estimated 11.7 average years of life lost by U.S. COVID victims, University of California at Berkeley demographers Joshua R. Goldstein and Ronald D. Lee also estimated that 250,000 additional deaths due to the disease would decrease average U.S. life expectancy at birth by about 10 months (0.84 years) - the biggest one-year drop since World War II but smaller than decreases in 1943 and several years in the 1920s and 1930s (mostly due to bad flu seasons), and just a fraction of the staggering 11.8-year decline in 1918.

Overcrowded jails in states such as Montana and Missouri are experiencing COVID outbreaks. One reason for the high COVID count in jails and the low count in prisons is that states for months halted "county intakes," or the transfer of people from county jails to the state prison system after conviction. Sheriffs in charge of the county jails blame their outbreaks on overcrowding partly caused by that state policy. Stefano Bertozzi, dean emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, visited California's San Quentin prison before the outbreak, and afterward helped pen an urgent memo outlining immediate actions needed to avert disaster. He recommended halting all intakes at the prison and slashing its population of 3,547 inmates in half. At that point, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was already more than two months into an intake freeze. Overcrowding has long been an issue for criminal justice reform advocates. But for Bertozzi, the term "overcrowding" needs to be redefined in the context of COVID-19, with an emphasis on exposure risk. Three inmates sharing a cell designed for two is a bad way to live, he said, "especially for the guy who's on the floor." But if those cells are enclosed, they offer far better protection from COVID-19 than 20 inmates sharing a congregate dorm designed for 20. "It's how many people are breathing the same air," Bertozzi said.

UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, one of the pioneers of the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR, thinks the biotech tool could be an essential one for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics. Due to its capacity to be "reprogrammed" like software, CRISPR could eventually be integral to countless tests and treatments. "One thing that's so intriguing about the whole CRISPR technology, it's a toolbox and there's many ways to repurpose it for manipulating genomes, but also for detection, even getting virus materials and the kinds of reagents that you need for an effective vaccine," she explained.

How does SARS-CoV-2 raise such havoc in the body? How does our immune system handle the attack, and why are some people more susceptible that others? How do vaccines work? Listen to a far-ranging conversation with Britt Blaunsinger, a virologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who is a specialist in viral infection.

Research exploring parental burnout has come into sharper focus during the COVID-19 pandemic as parents struggle with remote work in combination with virtual school learning for their kids, all while trying to keep everyone healthy. Dr. Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley has found that people who look for good enough (a group of people he calls "satisficers") are often more content with their choices compared to those who always aim for the best. His recommendation during the pandemic is to look for options that will produce good enough outcomes under the widest set of future states of the world. For parents, he recommends asking this question: "What can I do to make my child's life satisfying enough no matter what the future holds?"

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."

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."

The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the development of CRISPR-based tests for detecting disease - and highlighting how gene-editing tools might one day fight pandemics, according to one of its discoverers, Jennifer Doudna, biochemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

California workers who have lost their jobs during the pandemic are pessimistic about regaining their lost jobs. About 61% of the California workers who filed new unemployment claims during the week that ended on July 25 reported that they expected to be recalled by the employers who had laid them off or furloughed them, according to a report prepared by the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

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.

UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation is sounding the alarm about smaller housing providers facing dire consequences unless Congress acts to correct the income problem created by the pandemic. Housing providers will see a loss of asset value that could end in foreclosure, layoffs, and loss of investment in new housing, leading to reduced housing supply and housing price increases. "The results of the survey are sobering...The majority of survey respondents - more than 80% of who own or manage buildings with fewer than 20 units - reported a decline in their rental income compared to the first quarter of the year. We should all be worried that one in four landlords have already borrowed funds to make ends meet and almost two in five lack confidence in their ability to make ends meet over the next 90 days."

A handful of labs in the Bay Area, including ones at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley are working to gain a better understanding of how the coronavirus behaves by doing basic research with the live virus. The safety protocol is intimidating, but the research could prove incredibly valuable as the fight against the virus continues.

With the pandemic surging across the country, more and more communities are keeping watch for the virus in wastewater. Yosemite National Park, once a safe haven from the coronavirus, recently found the virus in the park's raw sewage system. A working group is being set up among Northern California utilities to share sewage testing methods and results, coordinated by UC Berkeley's Berkeley Water Center. "Wastewater monitoring for SARS-CoV-2 is still in its infancy in the Bay Area," said Sasha Harris-Lovett, a scientist at the Berkeley Water Center. "But there is a lot of interest in pursuing it."

Child care programs throughout the state are facing unimaginable financial burdens due to the pandemic. Some have closed permanently while others are on edge, unable to pay the rent and lacking money to buy snacks and cleaning supplies. A new report from UC Berkeley's Center for the Study of Child Care Employment presents the crisis in stark terms. After surveying 953 programs throughout California from June 22 to July 1, it concluded that the state's attempt to restart the economy "has only escalated the crisis in California child care, exposing providers to the dual threats of health risk and the potential collapse of their programs." "Providers are taking on credit card debt, missing rent or mortgage payments, and paying employees but not paying themselves," said Sean Doocy, co-author of the report. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

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.

With COVID-19 cases rising in the U.S. and the economic outlook bleak, it can be difficult not to slide into despair. Dr. Rick Hanson, a senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley discusses ways to build resilience during challenging times. Among other positive advice, Dr. Hanson offers, "I have a simple saying: Deal with the bad, turn to the good, take in the good. Take in the good and help it sink in. No matter how crazy it is around you or how bad it is, there are always things you can do inside your mind."

In the first weeks of the pandemic, as a shortage of testing kits, narrow testing criteria, and spotty contact tracing impacted California's ability to react to COVID-19, the virus continued to spread with lightning rapidity. Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, molecular biologist Fyodor Urnov formed what he called "SEAL Team Six:" hand-selected scientists, physicians and students who had constructed a volunteer lab in a matter of weeks to help relieve diagnostic lab Quest's backlog. They "moved heaven and earth" to get government certifications and create a highly automated lab that could run as many as 1,000 patient samples a day, he said. But when Urnov told nearby hospitals he could provide free testing and results in 48 hours, the hospitals declined, saying their electronic records systems were still entangled at Quest and LabCorp. The volunteers were stunned. "We said, 'What? Are you kidding me?' They have a direct link to a testing provider that has failed," Urnov said. "There's institutional inertia."