“It would be good to get a yellow light from the president to reopen,” Ms. Clark said. “But then on the ground it’s going to matter, how safe do people feel?”

The president’s desire to reopen the economy can be seen in the data: The crisis has already pushed more than 16 million people out of work in the past three weeks. Forecasters agree that a recession has already begun, with the only disagreement centered on how deep and painful it will ultimately be.

A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper released on Monday by economists from Northwestern, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Boston University predicts that the economy will shrink by 11 percent at year’s end from the same time the year before. That would be its sharpest contraction since 1946.

At a White House briefing on Monday, Mr. Trump said the administration was “very close to completing a plan to open our country hopefully even ahead of schedule,” saying it would “soon finalize new and very important guidelines to give governors the information they need to start safely opening their states.”

Mr. Trump added that “we want to be very, very safe” in terms of lifting restrictions, but said that Americans were eager to get back to work.

“I think we’re going to boom” once the economy reopens, he said.

Still, many economists warn that rushing back toward normal life too quickly, without the safeguards needed to prevent a second wave of the outbreak, could simply worsen the economic damage that Mr. Trump is trying to fix. Re-infection rates climbed in China, Singapore and Hong Kong after leaders eased strict economic restrictions that had initially slowed the virus’s spread.

Uncertainty about the virus has slowed economic activity even in places without state or local restrictions on activity.