CDC Activities and Initiatives Supporting the COVID-19 Response and the President’s Plan for Opening America Up Again

"This document briefly summarizes CDC’s initiatives, activities, and tools in support of the Whole-of Government response to COVID-19.

Overview of CDC’s Surveillance and Control Goals and Activities

The principal objectives of COVID-19 surveillance are to monitor the spread and intensity of the pandemic, to enable contact tracing to slow transmission, and to identify disease clusters requiring special intervention. Secondary objectives include understanding the severity and spectrum of disease, identifying risk factors for and methods of preventing infection, and producing data essential for forecasting. In addition to tracking the disease itself, monitoring of healthcare capacity and essential supplies through the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) is critical to ensure adequacy of care.

Because no single system can capture all parameters of the pandemic, CDC has implemented multiple, complementary surveillance systems (Appendix A). Key systems are case-based reporting through the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), laboratory-based surveillance, syndromic-surveillance data reported through the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), and data on healthcare system capacity reported through the NHSN (Appendix B). Additional systems, such as COVID-Net, provide rich, publicly available information for meeting secondary objectives. CDC continues to explore emerging and experimental surveillance platforms with a critical eye toward proven utility..."
CDC plan to reopen America