Should the CDC award grants for testing and contact tracing of COVID-19?
This bill authorizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to award grants for testing, contact tracing, monitoring, and other activities to address COVID-19. Entities such as federally qualified health centers, nonprofit organizations, and certain hospitals and schools are eligible to receive such grants. In awarding the grants, the CDC shall prioritize applicants that (1) operate in hot spots and medically underserved communities, and (2) agree to hire individuals from the communities where grant activities occur. This bill does not make testing or quarantine mandatory.
Sponsor: Rep. Rush, Bobby L. (Democrat, Illinois, District 1)
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How do you feel?
Opponents say
• "Most likely the proposed greatly expanded contact tracing program will be used to prevent a return to normalcy anytime soon. What’s needed is a nonpartisan, cost-benefit analysis of the current state shutdowns. Such an analysis would reveal that the negative outcomes of these shutdowns on the physical and mental health of Americans and on the American economy dwarf the negative outcomes from coronavirus infections of lifting the shutdowns." Source: The John Birch Society
Proponents say
• "case-based intervention approach … will be impossible to achieve for COVID-19 without a new national initiative that combines a massive expansion of rapid diagnostic tests in every community with unprecedented growth in a public health workforce and adoption of new technologies dedicated to case identification and contact tracing in each state...In order to trace all contacts, safely isolate the sick, and quarantine those exposed, we estimate that our public health workforce needs to add approximately 100,000 (paid or volunteer) contact tracers to assist with this large-scale effort." Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
• "The TRACE Act proposes awarding grant money to health care entities to expand coronavirus testing and contact tracing. Testing is not mandatory, and contact tracing would serve to alert people who might have been in contact with someone infected with the coronavirus." Source: USA TODAY