Information provided by the office of Congressman Jimmy Panetta.
On May 7, Congressman Jimmy Panetta—along with Congressman Jason Crow and Congresswoman Lauren Underwood—introduced legislation to create a Health Force and Resiliency Force to help respond to and combat the COVID-19 pandemic. If approved, the health force would recruit, train, and employ Americans to expand the public health workforce to combat the coronavirus and strengthen America’s longer-term public health response, according to a recent release. Senators Michael Bennet and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced companion legislation in the Senate.
“In order to emerge from this pandemic and get on the road to economic recovery, testing and contact tracing must be implemented and executed, especially if we don’t have a vaccine for COVID-19,” Panetta said. “To do that, a health force is necessary to administer the tests, isolate those who have tested positive, and trace and test the contacts of every carrier.”
In the release, Panetta said state and local governments don’t have the funding or infrastructure “to cover the cost and coordination of such a massive effort.”
“That is why we are introducing the bicameral Health Force and Resilience Force Act, a federally funded and locally managed effort to provide a dedicated workforce to perform these vital tasks and, ultimately, help us return to something approaching a normal life,” he said.
According to the release, the Health Force would be responsible for:
- Conducting contact tracing
- Administering COVID-19 tests, including antibody tests
- Supporting the provision of COVID-19 vaccinations (when available)
- Sharing COVID-19 public health messages with community members, including debunking myths and misperceptions
- Providing data entry in support of epidemiological surveillance and to meet broader health information system requirements
- Providing community-based and home-based services, including food and medical supply delivery to elderly and immunocompromised individuals
- Providing palliative and hospice care
- Providing other public health-related services, as needed
The Health Force is inspired by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, which similarly tapped the unemployed to help the nation recover from a sharp economic downturn, the release said. The Health Force would create a federally-supported and locally-managed program to train and deploy essential public and community health frontline workers, who could conduct testing, contact tracing, or eventual vaccine administration. The workforce would be trained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and managed by state and local public health agencies across the country.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced a goal to train at least 20,000 people to be contact tracers. The state’s local health departments would benefit from a surge of support for this endeavor, as well as services from infection control to food delivery for seniors and child care support, the release said. The Health Force would directly support the work of local agencies by giving young people the opportunity to fill the specific jobs different counties need while earning an income and building new skills.
After the current public health crisis concludes, the Health Force would provide grant funding and technical assistance to state and local health departments to hire and retain members to serve as health extension workers among vulnerable populations, in underserved areas and in future public health emergencies. These activities could include sharing public health messages with community members, providing home-based check-ins for seniors and new mothers and infants, providing vaccination schedule reminders for parents of children, connecting community members with health-related services (e.g. CalFresh), and more.
The Health Force will be a new component of the CDC Public Health Emergency Preparation (PHEP) which include 65 jurisdictions across all 50 states, territories, and tribal lands. According to the release, the CDC will develop and implement Health Force training packages, while state, local, territorial, and tribal funding recipients will hire, supervise, and retain force members using new grant or cooperative agreement funding provided through PHEP and/or Public Health Crisis Response. States, localities, territories and tribal entity funding recipients would actively recruit and manage force members. Â Recruitment would reach out to low-income, minority, and historically marginalized populations.
The legislation also includes the Resiliency Force, a proposal led by Senators Ed Markey and Chris Van Hollen, that would mobilize individuals at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the fight against the coronavirus by providing funding needed to hire and train 62,000 additional FEMA cadre of on-call response/recovery employees to perform public health and related functions, as well as respond to natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires.
Examples of Resilience Force COVID-19 response activities include:
- Providing logistical support for emergency procurement of medical equipment and other goods involved in COVID-19 response efforts
- Supporting COVID-19 testing and surveillance activities
- Providing other disaster preparedness and response functions for other emergencies and natural disasters
The bill text can be found here.
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