Delaware's Division of Public Health is awarded a grant to help implement expanded testing and data capacity for its COVID-19 response.
"We have staff now that are pretty burned out from working lots of overtime."
The state’s COVID-19 pandemic laboratory staff has been extremely busy according to Division of Public Health Director Dr. Karyl Rattay.
And she says part of the $67 million Epidemiology Laboratory Capacity grant from the CDC will help that issue.
"This grant is strongly supporting our laboratory capacity enabling us to buy reagents and to support more staff in our lab,” said Dr. Rattay. “It is also supporting our contact tracing program, which we've talked a lot about."
Rattay adds it also offers an opportunity to modernize their systems.
"Very importantly, it's helping us to purchase and modernize our surveillance and our IT platform so that we can more easily analyze, track, use our data to better understand what is going on within our population and to intervene in more targeted ways."
Rattay expects this funding will assist the state in creating a COVID-19 surveillance network to test symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals,
The grant will also support expanded statewide testing and analysis - including for vulnerable populations.
