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.

Ventilator SOS, a project co-led by mechanical engineering professor Grace O'Connell, is seeking donations of unwanted CPAP and BiPAP machines from people who may have used them for sleep apnea. They are converting the devices into much-needed ventilators for COVID-19 patients. "Tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients in this country and around the world will need respiratory support in the coming weeks and months," Professor O'Connell says. "We believe that using sleep apnea machines is a viable solution for non-ICU patients. This way, higher-grade ventilators can be reserved for patients with more advanced stages of respiratory disease." For more on the project, see this story at Berkeley Engineering.

After China began its COVID-19 quarantine, a satellite map highlighted a dramatic reduction in air pollution over the country. When chemistry and earth and planetary sciences professor Ron Cohen, an air quality researcher, saw the image, he predicted a similar effect in the Bay Area. Now the EPA has confirmed that pollution levels around San Francisco have decreased by more than one third over last year. "It's much bigger than drops of anything else we've ever looked at," Professor Cohen says. He and his team have investigated the numbers for nitrogen dioxide, one of the key pollutants, finding that its levels were roughly cut in half from the week before the shelter-in-place order to the next week. He says they'll learn a lot more as new data becomes available. It will help the researchers not only confirm pollution levels in the air, but also what its sources are. "We think we know how much comes from cars, how much from trucks, how much from industry. And all of those things suddenly changed by different amounts. So we'll be able to check," he says. Link to video.

Students and instructors from Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism are collaborating with the New York Times to write stories about how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting life throughout California. Launching the series, student Annie Berman writes about the resort town of Mammoth Lakes. The town is at an elevation of 7,881 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Berman writes: "At peak ski season, the population triples, a fact normally welcomed by civic leaders. ... But not now. Not when surrounding Mono County has the highest rate of coronavirus infection in the state. Not when the county's lone hospital has just 17 beds. Not when transferring a patient to another hospital means a special medical evacuation flight at a cost of up to $50,000, and when even this option can be delayed by frequent blizzard conditions. And when the town's thin air only makes respiratory ailments worse." In an interview, Dr. Tom Boo, the county's public health officer says, "I'm absolutely terrified."

We've been really fortunate to live in a time relatively free of the scariest pandemics of human history, says journalism professor and medical historian Elena Conis, in an interview about the historical context of COVID-19. Speaking of the polio pandemic, she says: "Movie theaters closed, church services cancelled, festivals cancelled, kids kept home from schools, swimming pools closed -- it shut down American towns." Link to video.

Molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, discusses the popup COVID-19 testing lab she's directing at the Innovative Genomic Institute on campus. Asked what her lab is doing differently than other labs, which are taking much longer to turn out test results, Professor Doudna says: "Well, we have a highly automated system. We were able to get robots into our lab quickly by donations from companies and faculty around the UC Berkeley campus. We have a team of people who are highly trained in how to run these robots and also how to manage the data coming out of the tests. ... And it's been amazing to see this operation come together so quickly with a team of people that, you know, three short weeks ago had no idea they would be doing this kind of work, but who recognized they could lend their experience to this effort." Link to video. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources around the world.

Mechanical engineering professor Grace O'Connell is co-leading a Berkeley effort to convert devices used to treat sleep apnea into much-needed ventilators for COVID-19 patients. In the schematic design she and her team developed, the modified CPAP or BIPAP machine accepts oxygen where ambient air enters the device. The oxygenated air is then filtered and delivered to a patient through an FDA-approved endotracheal tube, with the exhaled air re-filtered before being released. A volunteer community effort led by two students is gathering donated machines for conversion. It's estimated that there are 8-10 million machines available in American households for conversion. And since the devices and the components needed to convert them are readily available, these ventilators could be made available to patients much more quickly than newly manufactured ventilators. For more on this, see this story at Berkeley Engineering.

Psychology professor Dacher Keltner, co-director of Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, is sharing science-based strategies to cope with stress and uncertainty during the COVID-19 crisis in a series of short videos to be offered over the coming weeks. His first video, released Tuesday, offers an introduction to mindful breathing. Link to video. This story originated at Berkeley News.

The COVID-19 Ventilator Rapid Response Team, a group of engineers from Berkeley and doctors from UCSF and Mills Peninsula Hospital, has developed a way of using sleep apnea machines to provide oxygen to COVID-19 patients suffering severe respiratory illness. Another story on this topic appeared in Tech Crunch.

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.

Telling the story of how a robotic COVID-19 testing lab has been ramping up at lightning speed at Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), these reporters share a detailed timeline of actions key players took to spur the initiative. "If you've been following the US's slow-motion testing trainwreck, it should be obvious why they had heeded the call: The country needs more testing. ... IGI is among several academic labs that have wasted no time booting up operations to fill the still yawning void in Covid-19 testing," they write. Molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, is leading the project. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including PNAS.org, Interesting Engineering, The Scientist, Bio Portfolio, and KRON TV--link to video.

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.

Asked in an interview about what global drops in air pollution due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic can tell us, energy and public policy professor Dan Kammen, chair of Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group, says: "Well, it shows how quickly we can change our system. We've seen 30% to 40% drops in pollution over many of the world's cities. And it also shows us how quickly we could switch to clean energy if we took climate change as seriously as coronavirus. ... But it also shows us that actions do matter. Our individual decisions, whether we take an extra trip, whether we just drive to go get one thing at the store and come back, those actions all add up. And we scale it up to industry and to countries and regions. It really shows us that if we put our mind to it and if we invested in science we could not only do a far better job on climate change but we could also do it in a much more equitable way than we're doing now." Warning that overconsumption and its attendant pollution resurged after 9/11, and the same thing could happen when the coronavirus threat subsides, he says we'll be battling climate change for decades. "And so the real question is can we learn the positive lessons out of this horrible experience with coronavirus and say we want to switch to clean energy now? It's cheaper in many places and we want to invest in better systems so that low-income communities can actually generate their own power. Make themselves more resilient. And we're not doing that with coronavirus today by denying some of the poorest communities testing and respirators. And we're doing the same thing on climate. So we're making a natural disaster into a social disaster when we have all the tools to make this into a chance to really build a green stimulus." Link to video.

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).

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.

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.

As scientists race to find new diagnostic tests for the COVID-19 coronavirus, molecular and cell biology professor Jennifer Doudna is working on solutions using the CRISPR gene-editing technology she co-invented. Through Mammoth Biosciences, a biotechnology startup she co-founded, she aims to validate the CRISPR-based approach called DETECTR. It uses CRISPR to recognize specific genetic sequences and cut them. In the process, it also cuts a 'reporter' molecule added to the reaction, and that quickly shows if the viral genetic material is present. "Every single time we have an outbreak, we're one step behind in that we don't have a rapid diagnostic to detect that new organism," says Charles Chiu, an infectious-diseases physician at UCSF, who is working with Mammoth Biosciences. "The key advantage is that a CRISPR reaction is incredibly specific and can be done in 5–10 minutes." Another story on this topic appeared in Science.

Projections of imminent COVID-19 diagnoses can be overwhelming. Asked in an interview why the virus is spreading so far and so fast, Dr. Lee Riley, public health professor and chair of Berkeley's Division of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology, says: "We don't really know why this is happening. But one of the observations being made in China, where they have a lot of experiences now, is that the virus seems to be able to transmit even before someone becomes symptomatic. ... And then even after an infected person recovers from the illness, they continue to shed the virus up to two weeks to even 20 days. So there's more opportunity for an infected person to transmit. That's why I think so many other people get infected -- because there's many more days of infectious period for a person to contract the virus. That may be one of the reasons that it's spreading so quickly." Regarding the numbers of confirmed cases and how testing delays and shortages may be affecting them, he says: "One caveat is that these numbers that we're getting may be somewhat delayed because as you know, the testing is increasing in number, and so there's a real backlog of the tests. We don't really know exactly what's happening now. The numbers that we're seeing are based on the tests that were done several days ago, and they're just coming up because [at] a lot of the testing services, there's a huge backlog right now. ... We don't know which direction this is going to go. We may see a continued increase, a huge bump in the next several days, but that just means the results are just coming in."

Economics professor Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is among a group of more than 40 leading economists who have contributed to an eBook from the Centre for Economic Policy Research, urging quick and powerful fiscal responses to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. "We are facing a joint health and economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in recent history," he says in his chapter about how to flatten the infection and recession curves. Fiscal policies that governments can use to prevent or limit catastrophic collapses, are like the "intensive care units, beds and ventilators of the economic system," he says.

Fear and anxiety helped our early ancestors survive very real threats, says associate psychology and neuroscience professor Sonia Bishop in a Q&A about anxiety and the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. "Today, our fear response helps us act quickly in the face of modern dangers, like freezing in place instead of stepping into the path of an oncoming speeding car. In the case of this COVID-19 pandemic, our anxiety motivates us to run through different courses of action and identify the best options available to us. This process of simulation can result in successful future planning, but also in chronic worry, which can be exhausting, distressing, and debilitating." Offering tips for managing one's own anxiety, she also talks about what we can do to help our children with theirs. "Research suggests that children may possess the most extreme models of the world as being a safe, controllable place. Those models are reinforced by adults who try to shield them from the worst of the world. If children's models of the world as a safe place are suddenly shaken, they may suffer anxiety or stress reactions. Hence, with COVID-19, we need to help them adjust gently. Maybe we can tell them we are staying at home more because there is a new bug that can make old people quite sick, so we don't want to risk spreading it to them. It also helps to give them age-appropriate answers and reassurance. For example, you can tell them that children don't seem to get very sick from it." This story originated at Berkeley News. It was also reposted in the Berkeley Patch.

As financial markets worldwide plummet, infected by fear and uncertainty over the COVID-19 coronavirus, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a paper this week, predicting that the U.S. gross domestic product could contract by more than 7% this year if more parts of the country impose shelter-in-place orders like those the Bay Area has instituted through April 7, at least. They believe our government must become a "payer of last resort" for businesses and individuals who may be unable to pay their bills during the crisis. "The government can prevent a very sharp but short recession from becoming a long-lasting depression," they say.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, people are rushing to stores on "panic-buying" excursions, and evolution explains the phenomenon. Associate psychology and neuroscience professor Sonia Bishop studies how anxiety affects decision-making, and she suggests that the current situation is a textbook case of that. Referring to inconsistent messaging from the government, media, and public health authorities, she says, "We're not used to living in situations where we have rapidly changing probabilities." Ideally, she says, we should be taking the so-called "model-free learning" approach to assessing our risk in the face of uncertainty. That means trial and error -- using our personal experiences to gradually adjust our estimates of how likely something is to happen, how bad it would be if it does happen, and how much effort we need to put into preventing it. She says that when we don't have a model for how to cope with a threat, many people turn to model-based learning, a framework in which we either try to recall examples from the past or simulate future possibilities, and that's where "availability bias" creeps in. According to the reporter: "When we've heard or read about something a lot -- for instance, a plane crash covered extensively in the news -- it becomes so easy to imagine oneself in a plane that's crashing that one may overestimate the risk of flying. 'It's that ease of simulating that scenario that then overwhelms our judgements of the probability,' Bishop says."