State and County Governments to Receive Funds
Last week congress passed and the president signed HR 6074 which is an emergency supplemental funding bill providing $8.3B to address the coronavirus response. About $1B of that ($950M) is earmarked for county, state and tribal public health response efforts. Arizona is about 2% of the US, so our cut should be about $19M, which is a lot of money.
It’ll be important for state and county public health officials to have an open and informed dialog about the most effective use of those funds- both distribution and priority-wise. The narrative of the bill says that the state and county public health portion should be for surveillance, epidemiology, laboratory capacity, infection control, mitigation, and communications.