U.S. Congressman Michael Burgess, R-Pilot Point, was back home in Texas this week and gave a virtual interview with the Denton Record-Chronicle about the COVID-19 pandemic Thursday morning. Below are his answers to our questions as well as his thoughts about the pandemic's problems yet to be solved, edited for clarity and condensed.

In addition, here was his bottom line about the toll that COVID-19, the novel coronavirus, continues to exact:

“This looks bad on several fronts — the economic front, the biological front. We always get through these things. That’s the one thing that I’d like to leave people with. The despair sometimes gets pretty thick and pretty deep. But we always get through this.”

Are you meeting with constituents, and have you resumed your campaign — and are you wearing a mask?

Yes, some. Yes, limited. Mask under some conditions. The district office in Lake Dallas has stayed open this entire time. The building owner has restricted access. Most of the things that I’m doing now are like this [interview], on the telephone or a conference call. And as you might imagine, with all the Small Business Administration stuff that happened with the loans, our constituent service has been extremely active.

But that’s been via telephone, not face to face. I am now going to some public meetings, testing the waters there like everyone else. And when I go into my Walmart, I wear a mask because, oftentimes, it’s pretty crowded, and not everybody observes the one-way arrows on the aisles.

What is the next most important thing Congress can do to address the economic impact of the pandemic?

The most important thing is to allow a return to normalcy of business, commerce and employment. I think that will be different in different parts of the country, just as the behavior of the virus has been different in different parts of the country.

So there will need to be some flexibility about how things are or aren’t opened up. I think that is probably one of the reasons why the president left a lot of those decisions to the governors — a recognition that the illness is different in different parts of the country.

We are reading all the stories this week about how the number of cases has increased in some states. Texas is one of those states. Is it because we’re testing so many more people? Texas was probably behind on testing four or five weeks ago, and now that is trying to catch up.

In Denton County, those hospital usage numbers I saw, if I recall correctly, hospital usage a little over 60%, intensive care unit usage right around 40% and ventilator usage was between 16-20%. That's manageable. 

It was never going to be that we stayed with a shelter-in-place mode until there was no longer any danger from the virus. That’s just not a realistic expectation.

I do not think the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Congress can manufacture enough money to completely replace the entire economic through-put of the economy of the United States of America indefinitely.

We did some big things, some bold things throughout the month of March and April. I think they were necessary.

Mail-in ballots seems to be a logical solution to encourage people to stay at home and still fulfill an important civic duty. Are you in favor of mail-in ballots for Texans?

It has always been an option. One of the things that concerns me is the indiscriminate mailing of a ballot to every household. I think there’s work to be done on that.

Yes, the ability to vote is extremely important to me. I think people should be able to vote without feeling that they’re putting themselves at risk, but the integrity of the vote is also important. We don’t want someone’s legitimate vote to be canceled out by someone who wasn’t supposed to be given a recorded ballot.

Do you agree that curfews and deployment of state and federal troops were necessary, given that protests over the last two weeks have been largely peaceful?

I don’t disagree that the activity that I observed in Denton, city, and more broadly in Denton County has been of a peaceful nature. That is a First Amendment right that all of us have — the ability to petition our government and speak up.

Cities have an obligation to keep their citizens safe. If a curfew is what has been designated, it’s probably there for a reason.

I had not heard, and not aware of what you’re talking about as far as the enforcement mechanism, with bringing in the Texas State Guard or National Guard.

On the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slow response to test for COVID-19:

I still would like to know, not from the standpoint of who’s at fault, but if there was a problem or weakness with how the CDC received, and tested and reported results. We need to make darn sure we get that solved. Clearly, they got behind. I’d like to know why that was, and if there’s a way to fix that, if there’s some policy that needs to be changed, if there’s some obstacle that we put in their way, I’d like to know that. I’d like to identify it for us to correct that.

Finally, the latest on vaccine development: 

There are a lot of companies that are working on a vaccine. They’re not all working in the same pathway. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything quite like this, with the amount of work that is being done getting a vaccine available in a relatively short period of time.

One of the things I tease Dr. [Anthony] Fauci [director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] about is that his standard answer to whenever a vaccine becomes available is "18 months," and it never varies. It’s probably a pretty good way for someone in public health to manage expectations.

There’s good collaboration with the private sector, and different ways of creating a vaccine: some working on just the core of the RNA, some working on proteins that the virus produces, some done the old-fashioned way taking a denatured form of the virus.

There will be a market for it when it occurs. I know there’s some vaccine hesitancy on the part of some people. I’m not talking about a federal mandate to take the coronavirus vaccine, but I, for one, will willingly roll up my sleeve and take that shot the very first opportunity that it’s available.

Originally published here.