Fidelity Charitable donors have given $1.5 billion to nonprofits since January, with most of the grants going to support COVID-19 causes this month.

What’s more, the organization has been receiving an outpouring of questions from donors on how to give more efficiently to address the pandemic, according to Pam Norley, the head of Fidelity Charitable.

In collaboration with the Center for Disease Control Foundation, Fidelity Charitable recently sponsored a webinar titled, "How You Can Help With COVID-19: A Conversation with the CDC Foundation." The session was designed specifically to address supporting medical needs during the coronavirus pandemic.

“New developments are arising as I speak, and this session is to give you the latest facts in the spread of COVID-19. And, more importantly, to lay out plans for you to act now in responding to the need for more philanthropic funding,” Norley told the 3,000 webinar attendees. She added that Fidelity Charitable donors are mobilizing quickly to support the immediate and lasting relief needs of the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus has infected close to 423,000 people globally and have killed nearly 19,000. In the U.S. there are close to 55,000 infected cases and nearly 800 deaths.

“This is an unprecedented time and just to remind everyone, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience that we are all together in,” said Dr. Judith Monroe, president and CEO of the CDC Foundation. “History has taught us that pandemics occur periodically. We go back 102 years ago, and we had the most severe pandemic in recent history--the 1918 influenza. But this is the first time a pandemic has been caused by a virus other than an influenza virus."

Monroe cautioned everyone on the call to practice physical distancing. “It’s already overwhelming our health systems and will do that even more if you don’t do the physical distancing." And while she recommends that everyone stay home, she also suggests that if you go out, assume everyone is positive. That, she said, will drive your behavior. “You are going to keep that distance, you are going to wash your hands, wipe surfaces down and take extra precaution,” she said.

We don’t have the answers yet to a lot of crucial questions about this virus, she said. “But the one thing we know is that it’s going to be a long war. This is not going to be over soon,” she said.

The CDC Foundation, Monroe said, has built numerous capabilities as an operating foundation to serve the needs of public health. Over the years, she said it has established a number of emergency services in dealing with crises such as the Zika virus, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. 

The foundation, she said, received flexible funding to tackle the Ebola outbreak. “That flexible funding that came from donors allowed us to build an emergency operating center in West Africa," she said.. "They didn’t even have a place to meet to be able to take on the epidemic. We rapidly trained field epidemiologists and we were able to build lab capacity and quickly fund the vaccine trial in Sierra Leone, which was really important because we had all these cases of vaccines that we needed to test."

Although funding from the government had not yet been made available, Monroe said the foundation was able to get things kickstarted. “That’s [the] flexibility and catalytic nature of philanthropy.”

She said one of the things the foundation is proud of is how quickly they were able to train health-care workers in West Africa on infection prevention and control practices.

Turning to COVID-19, Monroe said one of the critical needs now is taking care of health-care workers by protecting them with surgical equipment and N95 masks. She noted that there is a shortage of masks, but the federal government is taking much more aggressive steps to fulfill that need. “Our health-care systems are overwhelmed because of supply chain issues and our health-care workers are in peril if they can’t get supplies,” she said.

Just last week, Monroe said, the foundation received a call from one of its philanthropic partners on the ground who was able to  acquire a large quantity of personal protective equipment, but needed to get payment to get them out to a hospital in a large state. “We responded quickly. Another call from one of the cities also involved donations of these products but they needed money for transportation. ... Again, we immediately responded.”

“We have to move faster than the virus and that’s really hard to do. This is not a time to move slow,” she said, adding that on Friday the foundation again acted quickly by contracting to cover the cost required for the immediate deployment of COVID-19 testing. 

Monroe said flexible funds during the COVID-19 pandemic are of utmost importance. “The first thing I want to say to everyone is, right now, given the situation, the best gift is actually unrestricted so that the professionals who are trying to manage this can move in real time,” she said. 

Secondly, she said donors can request geographic restrictions if they want to direct their donation to a particular city, state or community. The third preferred way to donate is to request a broader category like communication, testing and research, she said.

Monroe said homelessness is one of the areas where local health departments are asking for help. “There is a huge need to help with the homeless communit. ...Because they are in close quarters, they can spread (the virus) very easily,” she said.

At the national level, Monroe said, tele-help will be important. “We have to ramp up tele-help quickly. The federal government is doing that, but there are still other needs on the ground to really make that happen,” she said, noting that the foundation is working with some communities on that.

Communication is a real need right now at all leves, she saidl. “We know that some of our young people can become seriously ill," she said. “We have young adults who are not hearing the message, just not paying attention."

And at the global level, there is a great need for laboratory capacity, epidemiology, training and stronger international capacity.

On the public health level, the priority is to have a system that has the epidemiological capacity, laboratory workforce and emergency operation centers to be able to detect viruses and new pathogens. “We need to detect them and contain them early on,” she said.

Data modernization is also important, she said. What’s needed is an electronic case-reporting system across the nation, where data is flowing from hospitals and clinical systems to public health systems, she said. “We should use this opportunity to think about the data revolution that should take place for public health both in our nation and around the world,” she said.

There already have been positive developments in the battle against the epidemic, she said. Commercial labs are increasing testing capabilities and studies are coming out about COVID-19 treatments, she said.

“Everybody is scrambling," she said."It’s a worldwide race right now.”