CDC to give Georgia more than $115 million for public health

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it is awarding $3.2 billion to help local and state jurisdictions across the country strengthen their pub- lic health workforce and infra- structure. Georgia’s Department of Public Health is set to receive $105.2 million over five years, according to the federal agency. The Fulton County Board of Health is getting $10.5 million over 5 years.

This first-of-its-kind fund- ing provides awards directly to the state, local, and territorial health departments “to provide the people, services, and systems needed to promote and protect health in U.S. communities,” the CDC said in a press release. The CDC said, “everyone in the United States lives in a juris- diction that will receive funding under this new grant.”

The $3.2 billion includes $3 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act for jurisdic- tions to recruit, retain, and train their workforce, includ- ing front-line public health workers such as epidemiologists, contact tracers, lab- oratory scientists, community health workers and data analysts.

The funding also includes $140 million from a new appropriation for jurisdictions to strengthen and revitalize their public health infrastructure.

According to the CDC, the funding is intended to improve public health worker recruitment and training, strengthen public health systems and modernize data systems.

The Atlanta Journal-consti- tution documented the state’s failing public health data infrastructure earlier this year. In January, the AJC reported that independent public health experts said Georgia’s fail- ure to invest in DPH and its broader health care delivery and surveillance network had hampered response to the pandemic.

During the worst of the delta and omicron waves in 2021 and early this year, a torrent of testing data crippled the aging digital infrastructure behind DPH’S online COVID-19 dashboard. Public health officials blamed the problems on their aging technology systems.

“Many of our public health systems, and most of our public health IT systems, are legacy systems that were never, ever designed to handle millions and millions of data points,” Dr. Kathleen Toomey, the state’s commissioner of public health, said in January when the state was unable to publish new COVID19 data for several days. “As a result, these systems are failing when responding to the COVID pandemic, most specifically during surges.”

In 2021, the state Legislature approved $11.1 million for a vaccination data management system now online and budgeted $16 million for what DPH called its “Surveil

Program of the Future.”