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RolfAndreassen comments on Should effective altruists care about the US gov't shutdown and can we do anything? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
I am pretty sure CDC has people manning the phones...
Crucial agencies within HHS such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health will still be operating (Source)
I called 800-232-4636 and verified that they are manning the phones. If you want to check for yourself without wasting 5 minutes, skip the phone tree by pressing 1 for English and then 0 for an operator.
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.