24 | SEPTEMBER 3 • 2020 

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those cheesy things everyone 
tells you about how you’
ll take 
a class in college and it’
ll all just 
click and make sense actually 
happened for me.
” 
The class was 
a freshman sem-
inar at University 
of Michigan called 
Emerging Infectious 
Diseases. “I loved 
everything about it,
” 
she said. Public health 
“combines my love 
of biology and also foreign 
relations and government and 
politics and human behavior. I 
loved all of it.
”
That inspired Gadoth to 
get her master’
s in public 
health from the University 
of Michigan, and then do a 
yearlong fellowship through 
American Jewish World Service, 
working on maternal and child 
health initiatives in India. She 
returned to Ann Arbor to 
work as a toxicologist but soon 
realized she missed the human 
interaction side of public health, 
so she decided to go back to 
school for her Ph.D. 
Now, she’
s researching the 
impact of COVID-19 and try-
ing to figure out how to create 
and run a public health study 
during a global pandemic. 
Study development usually hap-
pens over the course of several 
months, Gadoth said, but this 
project was off the ground in 
about three weeks. 
That hasn’
t been the team’
s 
only timing challenge: they 
thought there would be a huge 
COVID-19 spike in L.A. in 
April, and they’
d be able to 
begin analyzing their data and 
drawing conclusions right away. 
But “we had a really low pos-
itivity rate among our health 
care workers and first respond-
ers, which makes the analysis 
really difficult to do,
” Gadoth 
said. “We have over 2,000 peo-

ple enrolled in our study, and 
only had 25 positives right up 
until a couple of weeks ago.
” 
Now, in the weeks after 
summer holidays and Black 
Lives Matter protests 
and a rolling back 
of state-imposed 
restrictions, that 
spike has arrived in 
L.A.
“
A funny, weird 
part of working with 
human populations 
... is that you just never really 
know when things are going 
to happen,
” Gadoth said. “You 
just have to be there, be ready 
and be collecting data the whole 
time, so that when something 
does happen, you catch it.
” 
Despite the roadblocks, 
Gadoth has found the research 
to be rewarding. She loves the 
ability to test people for the 
study and then provide them 
with their own test results in 
real time, she said. 
It also gives her a sense of 
purpose. “It would be really 
hard to be watching from the 
sidelines and be stuck at home 
if I didn’
t feel I was also able to 
add to our response in some 
way and sort out the questions 
that remain,” she said. 
Gadoth’
s public health 
advice to all Americans right 
now is to wear a mask and 
keep a distance from every-
one outside your household. 
When social interaction does 
happen, do it outside. And get 
your flu shot. 
“Please get your flu shot to 
protect yourself from another 
respiratory disease, which could 
have compounding effects if 
you have both simultaneously,
” 
Gadoth said. “We don’
t know 
anything about that yet, but 
they’
re both respiratory illnesses 
that could be really devastating 
to have a co-infection of those 
two things.
” 

COURTESY OF ADVA GADOTH

Adva Gadoth

Jews in the D

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