I think that [CDC shutdown] is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths.
Did you, perchance, mean expected deaths? It seems to me that CDC is important iff there is an outbreak of a deadly epidemic. Then one can discuss what the delta-deaths is actually likely to be; but at any rate it does not appear obvious that losing CDC for a month is likely to increase the number of deaths in a non-epidemic (ie, business as usual) environment. So there's a small chance P(epidemic breaks out while shutdown) times a not-very-well-known but conceivably quite large delta-deaths (CDC handles epidemic versus improvised handling). The latter should likely be, instead, "CDC has a watch officer at first report versus CDC scrambles to get a response together once the epidemic is obvious through other channels".
As for doing something about it: Perhaps you could crowdfund together enough money that CDC could have a skeleton staff manning the phones? Kickstarter, for example?
NB: I would not contribute to such a thing, I'm modelling someone who thought the expected-deaths calculation above came out with rather a large number.
It seems to me that CDC is important iff there is an outbreak of a deadly epidemic.
I was thinking of more mundane things, for example the yearly flu, which kills quite a few people yearly and would kill more but for careful monitoring of strains and preventative vaccination measures.
The CDC alone isn't what I'm concerned about. It's the small-to-medium inconvenience distributed over a very large number of research facilities, and the larger inconveniences to projects which are time sensitive.
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)