There are countless unregulated labs that are experimenting on infectious diseases at any given time, FACT not conspiracy. Labs can purchase virus genomic code to test how infectious, deadly a virus/bacteria can become.
The CDC doesnt have a grip or comprehensive record of all of these labs especially as any scientist with the means and access can purchase codes and tweak them to become more infectious under the right circumstances and understand rates of infection, mortality rate and whether a disease is going to be respiratory,muscular, coronary or whatever.
Groups of diseases behave a certain way, viruses mutate all the time, it's good to track and record all fluctuations. For example if sickle cell started elongating blood cells , they would be able to check the rate of transmission, groups of children born with the new version adverse reactions or benefits brought about by this new change etc etc etc. To further expound say this new version of Sickle cell is isolated to a small group in the Andes with a greater lung capacity because the air is thinner. This new sickle cell mutation may be seen as a benefit to the species rather than a killer. These people could be smarter, faster etc because of a single mutation.
Equally they could be testing to tweak the virus genomic code to make it less infectious and creating anti bodies and viracides; pulling out various code from a known airborne virus to lessen the time the virus stays active outside its host. Vs the more infectious version of the virus which rates of transmission maybe sneezing on surfaces with the virus staying alive for 36 hours where the modified version may only be alive for 3 hours.
I say all that to say viral testing isn't surprising, the pandemic we are going through isn't surprising either. Do some research on biological existential risk and the research being done around it.