Not long after California’s June 15 grand reopening, a celebration of the lifting of most of its COVID-19 restrictions, a substantial uptick in cases prompted L.A. County late last week to reinstate its indoor mask mandate. A number of Bay Area counties quickly followed suit, issuing strong recommendations, including for those who are vaccinated.
The latest hike is being driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. The mutation has rapidly spread across the globe and triggered new surges in the U.K. and in Russia. In the U.S., it has ripped through unvaccinated communities, and many vaccinated individuals now question if they’re at higher risk of rare “breakthrough” infections.
To learn more about the dangers posed by the Delta variant and its effect on the future of the pandemic, Berkeley News spoke with Maya Petersen, chair of the biostatistics division at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and an expert in infectious diseases and epidemiology. Petersen’s tireless work simulating COVID-19 spread in the Bay Area and providing data-driven recommendations to local officials prompted San Francisco Mayor London Breed to declare June 18, 2021, as “Maya Petersen Day” in the city.
Read the interview here.