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COVID-19 Accomplishments

CSTE’s Concept of Operations (ConOps) plan remained activated throughout 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The National Office continued its facilitation of conference calls and webinars while meeting technical assistance needs that
proved crucial during the spread of subsequent variants. A summary of programmatic response activities from January 2021 to
December 2021 is included below.

Convenings

• Facilitated rapid bidirectional communications between CDC’s Incident Management
System (IMS) and CSTE members by sharing information, resources, and guidance
documents and providing feedback to inform response strategies and address
emerging needs.
• Hosted internal coordination briefings for CSTE staff in support of the pandemic
response.
• Hosted weekly CSTE All State Epidemiologist calls to discuss emerging issues and
response-related needs. Invitees include State Epidemiologists, City and Large Urban
Area Epidemiologists (CLUE), and the CSTE Executive Board.

• Hosted weekly CDC/CSTE COVID-19 Core Group calls to provide rapid feedback on
national response strategies, pre-decisional guidance documents, resources, and
tools.
• Hosted weekly CDC/CSTE/APHL COVID-19 calls as a forum to discuss close-hold
issues and emerging topics for COVID-19 laboratory and epidemiology practice.
• Hosted biweekly COVID-19 Data Preparedness workgroup calls to address ongoing
and emerging challenges and topics of interest for COVID-19 data preparedness, with
an emphasis on an informatics, solutions-based perspective.