As the list of available antibody tests for the COVID-19 virus soars, scientists and the FDA are investigating their accuracy and effectiveness. Only 12 have received FDA authorization for emergency use. Assistant bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu and UCSF microbiology and immunology professor Alex Marson are both working on the Berkeley-UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute's effort to study more than 100 antibody test kits for their effectiveness. According to this reporter: "To assess their ability to identify antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the team used plasma or serum samples from three groups: 80 people who had shown symptoms of COVID-19 and had tested positive using a PCR-based screen, 52 who had a respiratory infection but were found to be infected with another virus or had tested negative on a PCR test for SARS-CoV-2, and 108 blood donors whose samples were drawn in 2018 or earlier, before the pandemic began. ... Their assessment found that the ability to detect antibodies in people who had tested positive for the virus increased over time, rising to 81–100 percent when more than 20 days had elapsed since symptoms began, depending on the product. One of the members of the team, Patrick Hsu ... notes that this finding highlights why longitudinal antibody testing is important, given that a negative result may mean a person had been exposed to the virus but hadn't yet developed a detectable level of antibodies. On the specificity side, the proportion of false positives found in the pre–COVID-19 samples ranged from 0–16 percent. The agreement between the findings of LFAs and ELISAs ranged from 75–94 percent. The team posted its results as a preprint on the project website on April 24. Alex Marson ... cautions that some numbers, especially for tests' ability to detect antibodies in positive cases, may be revised as his team continues to analyze the data."

California voters broadly approve of Gov. Gavin Newsom's handling of the state's coronavirus crisis, and although economic pain is widespread, a vast majority wants to end shelter-in-place rules slowly, according to a new poll from Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies. Among the poll's findings was the claim by 16% of the respondents that they were unemployed April 16-20, when the poll was taken, and nearly 4 in 10 said they expect to lose their job because of the pandemic. That concern was strongest among African American and Latino voters, as well as those without a college education. Nearly 7 in 10 voters said they fear getting sick with COVID-19, and 9 in 10 said they see it as a threat to their own or their family's health, while 83% deemed it a threat to their personal finances. Politically, the poll found that voters are following a national pattern of supporting their governors, and they have much less confidence in the federal government and President Trump's leadership. "That's what we'd normally expect to see," says political science professor Eric Schickler, the institute's co-director. Nationwide, "governors are benefiting" from the tendency of voters to rally around their leaders, at least initially, "during a time of national crisis," he added. This story was reprinted in dozens of sources. For more on the poll, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, discusses the rapid transformation of one of her labs in the Innovative Genomic Institute into a popup COVID-19 testing lab that uses robots. The interview, in Italian, is the journal's cover story. For more on the lab, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources around the world.

Chemistry, molecular and cell biology, and nutritional sciences and toxicology professor Daniel Nomura, an investigator in the Berkeley-UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute, has been working with the pharmaceutical company Novartis on ways of developing drugs that harness proteins using cysteine-reactive probes. That work is now being adapted in efforts to fight COVID-19 by targeting the virus's proteins. Speaking of the main protease they're investigating, he says: "This enzyme is really well behaved and has at the center of it this amino acid -- a cysteine -- that coordinates the chemistry. ... We have this very large library of cysteine-targeting covalent ligands that we've been building out over many years. ... We thought that was a perfect way into targeting the catalytic cysteine of what I would consider a highly druggable protein."

This is the stunning cruelty of the U.S. that shocks large portions of the world. Many workers are not just temporarily out of work, but are registering the collapse of their work worlds, the prospect of no paycheck, homelessness, a pervasive sense of being abandoned by the society to which they should rightly belong, says comparative literature and critical theory professor Judith Butler in an interview about the personal and political implications of vulnerability and mourning amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking of vulnerability, she says: "Humans share the air with one another and with animals; they share the surfaces of the world. ... These reciprocal and material modes of sharing describe a crucial dimension of our vulnerability, intertwinements and interdependence of our embodied social life. ... On the other hand, the public response to the pandemic has been to identify 'vulnerable groups' -- those who are especially likely to suffer the virus as a ravaging and life-threatening disease and to contrast them with those who are less at risk of losing their lives from the pathogen. The vulnerable include Black and Brown communities deprived of adequate health care throughout their lifetimes and the history of this nation. The vulnerable also include poor people, migrants, incarcerated people, people with disabilities, trans and queer people who struggle to achieve rights to health care, and all those with prior illnesses and enduring medical conditions. ... For those who are homeless or unemployed, the economic forecast could not look bleaker. Without a working and equitable health care system, the affirmation of health care as a public good and a mandate of government, the unemployed are left to scramble for alternatives to avoid falling ill and dying for lack of care." About mourning, she says: "Learning to mourn mass death means marking the loss of someone whose name you do not know, whose language you may not speak, who lives at an unbridgeable distance from where you live. One does not have to know the person lost to affirm that this was a life. What one grieves is the life cut short, the life that should have had a chance to live more, the value that person has carried now in the lives of others, the wound that permanently transforms those who live on. What someone else suffers is not one's own suffering, but the loss that the stranger endures traverses the personal loss one feels, potentially connecting strangers in grief."

A massive UC Berkeley-UCSF joint study of more than 100 antibody tests for COVID-19 came up in a discussion of scientific developments in the treatment of COVID-19 on the PBS NewsHour Wednesday. UCSF microbiology and immunology professor Alex Marson, scientific director of the Berkeley-UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute, joined the discussion. "Finding a test that will tell us easily who's protected from reinfection – it's all of our hopes. There's a lot of work ahead to be done, but one message I want to get out there very, very clearly is that none of these tests should currently give anyone a feeling that they're safe from reinfection and can modify their behavior to take on more risk. We're just not there yet." Link to video. Professor Marson's part of the interview begins at the 5:49 mark. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Other stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including CNN (link to video) and the New York Times (Reuters).

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.

The House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy has sent letters to companies making antibody tests to demand their test data after a Berkeley/UCSF study found that their tests were flawed. The study is looking at more than 100 antibody test kits to determine their effectiveness in identifying people who may be immune to COVID-19. For more on the study, see our press release at Berkeley News. Another story mentioning the Berkeley/UCSF study appeared in U.S. News & World Report, and assistant bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu, an investigator at Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) who is co-leading the project, discussed the project on CNN Newsroom--link to transcript.

A lot of the finest minds of the world have turned to COVID-19, information and electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Hany Farid says about the unprecedented galvanization of academia to help solve the global crisis. Professor Farid, an expert on deepfake imagery and online misinformation, has also switched gears to research the spread of misinformation and conspiracies related to the coronavirus. Noting that the problem is global, and that people are scared and turning to social media, he says that that provides the conditions for a perfect "s—storm." Referring to social media posts promoting dangerously bogus ideas about COVID-19 cures, he says: "This is why we have people drinking bleach thinking they're going to be cured. ... We need to undo the stupidity that's out there." To that end, he developed a survey last week, asking some 500 people to read 40 COVID-19-related headlines, of which half were true and half were not, and report if they had seen the headlines, believed them, or knew someone who would believe them. About 15% of the respondents said they knew someone who would believe the gargling bleach cure is valid, according to preliminary results. "That's shocking," he says. "Now the question is what's next." Answering that call, he's developing early detection systems to spot online misinformation campaigns and flag them for social media companies.

Emergency shelter-in-place orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic have closed laboratories and disrupted research projects all over the world, leaving scientists scrambling to protect their work and prepare to resurrect it. Discussing the problem, electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Randy Katz, vice chancellor for research, says that a break of a few weeks isn't likely to cause irreparable damage, but the losses will be hard to avoid if the rules are in place for months." Animals don't live forever," he says, noting that one example is the necessity of testing mice bred to have a particular genetic condition or disease at a certain age, which gives researchers limited time frames for their work. Another example is disrupted work by Berkeley scientists to measure snowpack at field stations in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. That data guides state officials who decide how much water will be available for consumption or crop irrigation. "We obviously need to go when there is snow," he says. "If we wait too long, the opportunity is lost." Also weighing in on the disruptions, astronomy professor Alex Filippenko says he thought he was safe when he got special permission to take a last look at supernovas and other celestial objects related to their study of the current rate of expansion in the universe from a remote observing room on campus connected to the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii's Mauna Kea, but then he heard that first night that the telescope was being shut down. He scrambled to make other plans, but by the time he'll be able to look again, he says, those phenomena will have vanished.

I think they're playing Russian roulette,'' Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical public health professor emeritus and expert in infectious diseases, says about states that are prematurely reopening businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic. They're hoping obviously that reopening the states is not going to lead to increased cases. They have no way of monitoring the answer to that question until it explodes," he adds. "If they reopen the state without adequate testing and without adequate contact tracing, there will be more cases, and they won't recognize those cases until they start appearing in the emergency room and then in the ICU.'' He also points out that some of these states -- including George, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Alaska -- weren't doing enough testing to begin with. "They don't know where they're starting from, so they're really doing this whole thing in a blind fashion. ... It's like putting a blindfold on and walking forward."

If I could wave my magic wand and we all had electric cars tomorrow, I think this is what the air would look like, says chemistry and earth and planetary sciences professor Ron Cohen, an air quality researcher, referring to the beneficial side-effect of improved air quality during the COVID-19 shutdown. He and his team are monitoring air quality, and through an analysis of satellite measurements they've found a 32% decline in levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution over the first three weeks of shelter-in-place rules in Southern California, compared to the prior three weeks. They also, however, found a 26% reduction between the same periods in 2019, suggesting that spring weather contributed to the effect. "Driving is dramatically lower," he says, "but differences in weather between this year and last still make it hard to put numbers on how much cleaner the air is because of the shelter-in-place." Expressing dismay about how the pandemic is helping his research, he says: "It's terrible to get that view by people getting sick. ... It's not at all how we would design the experiment if we had a choice."

The tragedy on 24 April 2013 killed 1129 and injured more than 2500 workers. In response, Western companies invested in two organisations: The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh created by European businesses and The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety created by North American retailers. The brands declared that it was no longer going to be business as usual and that they would strictly monitor and inspect a portion of Bangladesh’s factories.

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.

A newly published survey of 30,000 hourly service sector workers, conducted between September 2017 and November 2019 by Berkeley's Shift Project, found that roughly 55% of workers at some of the largest grocery, food service, big box, and retail stores in the country said they lacked access to paid sick leave. "The widespread lack of paid sick leave for service sector workers has serious consequences for workers' own health, for the wellbeing of those they care for, as well as for public health," says assistant sociology professor Daniel Schneider, the Shift Project's founder and a co-author of the report. "During a global pandemic, these consequences become all the more urgent." As this reporter points out, an emergency coronavirus law has expanded paid sick leave in the U.S., but it exempts employers with 500 or more employees.

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.

A new COVID-19 testing system that harnesses CRISPR gene-editing technology takes significantly less time to report results -- roughly 40 minutes, compared to the 4-to-6-hour turnaround with currently used tests. The scientists developing the CRISPR test are from UCSF and Mammoth Biosciences, a startup co-founded and advised by molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna, one of CRISPR's co-inventors. On Thursday, the researchers published a second study demonstrating the test's capabilities in the largest-yet sample of real patients in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Biotechnology. Speaking of how easy and self-contained the test is, compared to others currently used, Charles Chiu, associate director of the UCSF clinical microbiology laboratory and the scientist leading the study with Mammoth, says: "I can run it now myself at home. ... What we really want to develop is something like a handheld, pocket-sized device using disposable cartridges" that nonexperts could use. He says they plan to submit the test for FDA approval next week. Stories on this topic have appeared in more than 100 sources around the world, including CNET, KPIX Online, and KTVU--link to video.

A new analysis of Google's Community Mobility Reports by assistant statistics professor Jacob Steinhardt and a colleague at MIT estimates that San Francisco might be able to regain up to 70% of normal mobility without spurring a major resurgence of the COVID-19 outbreak once it has passed it initial peak of cases. The study looked at other regions, as well, tailoring their predictions based on data regarding caseloads. Professor Steinhardt stresses the caveat that their conclusions are highly uncertain, and the regions they analyzed should not ease restrictions without first instituting effective strategies to track the disease's spread to quickly identify rebounds. "With the data we currently have, we actually just don't know what the level of safe mobility is," Professor Steinhardt says. "We need much better mechanisms for tracking prevalence in order to do any of this safely."

A new COVID-19 testing system that harnesses CRISPR gene-editing technology takes significantly less time to report results -- roughly 40 minutes, compared to the 4-to-6-hour turnaround with currently used tests. The scientists developing the CRISPR test are from UCSF and Mammoth Biosciences, a startup co-founded and advised by molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna, one of CRISPR's co-inventors. On Thursday, the researchers published a second study demonstrating the test's capabilities in the largest-yet sample of real patients in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Biotechnology. The test does currently have some flaws, including false negatives, but, as Charles Chiu, associate director of the UCSF clinical microbiology laboratory and the scientist leading the study with Mammoth, says: "The advantage of this test is that it could be done rapidly, and even multiple times, if needed. ... We literally went from nothing to an assay in three weeks. ... This is a state-of-the-art technology. ... It's going to undergo a lot of regulatory scrutiny because it's going to be the first of its kind." Chiu says they plan to submit the test for FDA approval next week.

However long it takes us to shake off the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant economic seizure, one very long-lasting impact could be, as this reporter puts it, the fact that "investors in their formative years have just discovered that stocks come with big risks attached." A study co-authored by business and economics professor Ulrike Malmendier found that investors who were young when they learned about poor equity performance tend to avoid stocks, while those who grew up in better times were less affected by downturns in the markets. And the effects aren't limited to young investors. In another study, Professor Malmendier and her colleagues found that CEOs who were young adults during the Great Depression were less likely to leverage up their firms than those who grew up in more solvent times.

A new interactive mapping tool created by the Opportunity Mapping Project at Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute overlays COVID-19 infection and mortality rates with a California map identifying areas with the highest pollution levels to help identify the most at-risk areas. "As this crisis has advanced, we wanted to bring the work we were doing to the coronavirus analysis," says Arthur Gailes, the fair housing coordinator for the Opportunity Mapping Project. "What are the groups that are disproportionately vulnerable specifically due to the quarantine and the economic crisis? ... Where are people specifically likely to be the most hurt by this crisis?" The project follows other research indicating a link between COVID-19 mortality rates and higher levels of air pollution, and, according to this mapping project, that would make areas like Bakersfield, Fresno, and Visalia some of the higher-risk areas in California. For more on this, see this story at Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute.

If we're not churning or mixing, we're on the phone or answering emails, says doctoral molecular and cell biology student Abrar Abidi, speaking of the effort he and a small group of volunteers have been putting into the production of hand sanitizer for the Bay Area's most vulnerable residents. Working from a lab at Berkeley's Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, and funded by donations, they have distributed hundreds of gallons of their santizer among homeless shelters, the San Francisco County Jail, and food banks in the area. "You have thousands of people who have been obliged to live on the street and have barely any place to wash their hands," Abidi says. "I believe that having access to basic hygiene supplies and the ability to keep ourselves healthy should be a basic human right," adds research assistant and volunteer Yvonne Hao. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Another story on this topic aired on KPIX TV--link to video.

A new joint research project by Berkeley and University of Chicago researchers will offer weekly updates on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on small and medium-sized businesses, Berkeley's California Policy Lab announced last week. Economics and public policy professor Jesse Rothstein, director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the California Policy Lab, says the research aims to help inform policymakers about the pandemic's effects on workers. One of their key findings has been that 40% of the clients of the software firm Homebase, which provides data from workers' timecards, had at least temporarily closed their doors by March 22. By that same week, 91 percent of firms were reporting fewer hours than in late January. He also says it appears that many companies that are shutting down are not laying off workers, but keeping them. "To me that's really good news," he says. Professor Rothstein was recently interviewed for a story at Berkeley News, and he participated in a panel discussion with other Berkeley faculty on Friday. That discussion can be viewed online here.