Dr. Monica Gandhi, the infectious disease expert who criticized public health officials’ handling of the Cal football program’s COVID issues last week, would like a do-over.
“I should not have commented without knowing the details,” Gandhi told the Bay Area News Group in an email exchange Sunday.
In making her original comments, Gandhi said that the football players and team staff who had tested positive were asymptomatic. That was false: There were dozens of symptomatic cases, according to information that has since come to light.
As a result of the positive tests, the Bears were shorthanded for the Arizona game Nov. 6 and unable to play USC on Nov. 13 because of a barrage of positive tests.
Gandhi is the associate chief for the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF. During an interview with KPIX last week, she offered a sharp rebuke of Berkeley Public Health’s decision to request the testing of the entire football program — even asymptomatic, vaccinated individuals.
“I have zero panic whatsoever as a public health person, as an infectious disease doctor, of 44 healthy people who are fully vaccinated who may have a little virus in their nose on a highly sensitive test,” she told KPIX at the time.
“It is not an outbreak, it does not mean they got sick, and it does not mean the vaccines don’t work. It means that our public health strategy in this case was off and they were doing mass testing of people who didn’t need it.”
Since that point, new information has come to light, including three additional positive tests.
All in all, there were 47 positive tests within the 150-person (approximate) program, including players, coaches and staff. Of the positives, 31 were symptomatic, although it’s not known how many players — they reportedly are 99 percent vaccinated — tested positive or had symptoms.
Highly sensitive PCR machines were used for the testing, which occurred over multiple weeks. The machines can detect inactive virus for up to 90 days and thus produce false-positive results. For that reason, PCR tests are not recommended for COVID-positive individuals for up to three months after infection. Cal had not undergone team-wide PCR testing since the 2020-21 school year, according to a source.
When asked if Berkeley and Cal health officials made the right decision to test the entire team based — and if her criticism of the process was fair — Gandhi responded:
“I will also post publicly on Twitter to ensure that I was trying to make a larger point about endemicity and media coverage of cases and I should not have commented on an evolving situation.”
In a lengthy thread on her Twitter feed (@MonicaGandhi9), she included the following comment Sunday at 2:34 p.m.:
“Of note, details of football outbreak Cal emerging in terms of symptomatic/ asymptomatic infections (check local news sources for details) so points raised in this piece are not about football but shift in thinking reflected by the CDC this past week on control not herd immunity.”
During the interview last week with KPIX, Gandhi said: “If we don’t have more confidence in the vaccines, we are going to be in a ‘never-ending pandemic.'”
The Bears are expected to be healthy enough to play Stanford on Saturday in Big Game.
— East Bay Times Editorial Page Editor Daniel Borenstein contributed to this article.
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