By Joey McWilliams
The United States Senate worked throughout the week on a bill to help individuals, families and businesses with financial issues brought about as a result of the spread of COVID-19. That bill was passed on Wednesday, 96-0. 
The House is expected to vote by voice on that bill on Friday.
The bill includes sending funds to state and local governments, with Oklahoma set to receive $1.25 billion of the $150 billion in the deal. It will allow for direct checks to adult individuals for $1,200, $2,400 for married couples, and an additional $500 for dependents.
There is also provision for small business and nonprofits through a $367 billion loan to grant program that pays the payroll while employees are out of work. Loans of up to $10 million will be forgiven if used for payroll, utilities, or lease payments.
Senator James Lankford (R-OK) spoke on Friday about the benefits of that bill, and said it is legislation designed to stabilize the economy, not to stimulate it.
“This is not a stimulus package,” Lankford said. “The 2008 package that was done with TARP and all those things, that was really stimulus because it was deep recession based on economic issues. This is more like an economic relief package due to a worldwide pandemic.
“You go back to February, our economy was going gangbusters. It was a constant roaring economy. We had very high new job development in February and in the last three weeks the economy has absolutely collapsed due to this pandemic.”
“Mostly because government and all of us around the country are suddenly not working next to each other. Now we’re working from home, less travel for us in Oklahoma, and obviously less gasoline consumption worldwide. So we have a huge surplus of gasoline worldwide, which is driving the prices down dramatically.
“So this is a whole contagion of things. So this is not a stimulus, in other words, trying to get the economy to restart. We’re trying to stabilize people in their jobs, to keep workers in their jobs and keep families still employed and connected until we get on the other side of this.”
Lankford also spoke about progress on the medical front to go along with the economic help.
“The hope and the prayer is that we can do several things. We get a lot more testing on board and testing is finally coming on board faster. We have 17 new companies now that are producing different types of tests for COVID-19. That’s going to help us get a larger quantity of tests out there of different types.”
The tests coming may not only be able to test if a person is positive or negative for COVID-19, but also to determine if a person has already had the virus.
“As you know, some people get it and they don’t feel the effects of it. It’s very mild to them but they did get it. And it also means that they are immune to it in the future.
“So in the next couple of weeks, we’ll get more tests and in the next couple of months, we’ll have a testing system on board so people can evaluate whether they’ve already had it or if they still need to get a vaccine. By the end of the year, we hope to have a vaccine on board. We also have new therapeudic treatments coming on board. That will help a lot so if you get it, we know there is a way to treat it.”
As for today, Lankford said the government is trying to stabilize the economy until treatments or vaccines are available.
“This is ‘stop-gap’ in between to be able to keep people employed so that on the other side of this our businesses can quickly restart.
“But no one really knows what’s going to happen next in this whole process.”