Pennsylvania’s Department of Health seeks $301M federal covid-19 grant
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Pennsylvania’s Department of Health is pursuing a $301 million federal grant to strengthen its ability to respond to the covid-19 pandemic, and will earmark $100 million for local health departments if the grant is awarded.
“This funding is essential to our future response to the covid-19 pandemic in Pennsylvania,” Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said of the grant from the Centers for Disease Control. “In our application, we earmarked about a third of that funding, more than $100 million, to bolster county and municipal public health departments’ response.”
The department also will continue its close collaboration with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, which separately received more than $92 million from the CDC to assist its work .
The grant submission focused on ensuring that minority and underserved communities are targeted for testing, outreach and improved demographic data collection.
If awarded, the grant will support five primary response strategies:
• Strengthen lab testing ($96 million): Ensure that testing is available and accessible throughout Pennsylvania, partner with vendors to deliver testing at long-term care facilities, purchase supplies to increase testing capacity at the state level.
• Improve public-health lab data exchange ($3 million): Enhance and expand laboratory results information infrastructure, to enable faster and more complete date exchange and public-health data reporting.
• Improve surveillance and reporting of electronic health data ($5 million): Enable comprehensive, daily reporting to the CDC in a machine-readable format.
• Use lab data to enhance investigation, response and prevention ($84 million): Develop a robust investigation and contact-tracing infrastructure for in-depth case investigation, research and addressing of health disparities related to covid-19 and fund six outreach specialist positions to serve as liaisons to traditionally under-served communities.
• Coordinate and engage with county and municipal health departments ($103 million): Support the state’s six county health departments and four municipal health departments so they can bolster their infrastructure and workforce needs to address local public health needs.
An additional $8 million would be earmarked for building expertise to support management of covid-19 related activities in the state.
“We intend to use the balance of the grant funding to expand our testing efforts, case investigating and contact tracing and our data infrastructure to improve our response,” Levine said.