COVID-19 is a tricky, slippery villain. Sometimes it looks like a bad cold or the flu; at other times, a heart attack or stroke. All over the world, it eludes the heroes in the white coats by changing its identity, location by location.
Clearly, this viral villain requires vigilant surveillance. And the implementation of “alternative COVID-19 surveillance methods” is just what the North Carolina General Assembly singled out when it allocated $15 million of the latest federal COVID-19 funding to the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory based at Carolina. The $15 million allocation approved by the state legislature in March is subject to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approval since the funding is allocated by the CDC Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity cooperative funding agreement to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to detect, respond to, control and prevent infectious diseases.