COVID-19 didn't kill the nation's economy; it was the government's policies on shutting down the country, "however well-intentioned" that may have done that," Rep. Tom McClintock told Newsmax TV Monday.

"We have to be very careful going forward that we're not doing more damage than good," the California Republican told Newsmax TV's "The Chris Salcedo Show."

Peer-reviewed studies from Stanford Univerity and Oxford University, suggest the coronavirus had been circulating for many months before it was discovered that it had infected a large portion of the population, McClintock noted.

"If that is the case, then these home detention orders now affecting more than 200 million Americans are "both ineffective and unjustified" and may end up doing enormous harm and "very little good," said McClintock.

"We won't know that unless there's a randomized serological test of the population so that we can judge whether those studies are correct or not," he added. "If they're correct in what we're doing is exactly wrong and this is creating an enormous amount of harm."

McClintock also Monday predicted that the fourth coronavirus stimulus legislation will contain a great deal of politics and "very little actual relief" for the economy.

"The core of the CARES Act, the bill we passed a couple of weeks ago is important," said McClintock. "It gets liquidity into a liquidity-short market, and companies are going to be facing an insolvency crisis if we don't solve the liquidity crisis."

However, the bill achieves that goal "very inefficiently," he said. "can't tell you that all $2.5 trillion dollars or even more...will actually keep the temporary job losses from becoming permanent job losses.