May 12, 2020

Dear Friend,

As your Congressman, my number one priority has always been the health and safety of North Texans. We are now entering a new phase of the coronavirus pandemic. As our state starts to reopen, it is time we change our approach, and go on the offensive against COVID-19. Stay home measures, wearing face masks, and social distancing have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus and reduce the risk of overwhelming our health care systems. But we must do more. Our region has seen consecutive days at a peak in the number of coronavirus cases. 

Now, we must enhance testing and expand tracing. A comprehensive plan of attack is the key to successful health and economic outcomes. That’s why I wanted to share with you my interview with D Magazine which lays out a common sense plan for beating COVID-19:

Q&A With U.S. Rep. Colin Allred: We Must ‘Shift From a Defensive Posture

What we have lacked from the very beginning, from the federal level on down, is a comprehensive plan that can be explained to the American people. They need to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, how long they’ll be expected to look out for this, what the risks will be when we start to emerge from it, and what the long-term risks are going to be until we have the vaccine.

I understand the frustration with the stay at home orders, with social distancing and being asked to wear masks, because the impression that was given was that this is going to be over very soon. But they weren’t told what the sacrifice was for, or how long they’d be asked to sacrifice.

Hopefully it’s not too late to lay out a comprehensive plan.

We’re going to take about $50 billion and use it for contact tracing and to help folks isolate and quarantine. If you talk to any healthcare official about what they are doing right, in South Korea, in Germany, in some of the countries that have done much better than we have in terms of controlling the spread of the virus, they tested on a much higher per capita scale. They aggressively traced everyone who’d come into contact with someone who was positive, and they helped them quarantine or isolate, to reduce the spread of the virus.

That is going to be the next step of this. In South Korea, they talk about the virus like it’s an enemy, and they want to hunt it down and hold it down. And that’s what we need to be doing. We need to be thinking about the virus as something that’s actively moving through our community, that we have to go on the offensive against. Social distancing and stay at home orders save a lot of lives and they’ve saved our healthcare system from being overwhelmed. But they are not offensive in nature. We’re still seeing rising cases. And that’s part of the reasons that we have to go out there and actively fight this virus.

Read my full D Magazine interview here.

I know North Texans have questions to ask surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, which is why I am hosting another Telephone Town Hall today, May 12 at 1:30 pm CST. I will be joined by local health experts who can help answer your questions. Please RSVP here: https://allred.house.gov/live to receive a call from me this afternoon in order to participate or listen in.

Sincerely,

Colin Allred
Member of Congress

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