In Birmingham, the assistant manager at a shoe store is waiting inside the front door of his store 90 minutes before opening. He’s carrying a digital infrared thermometer in one hand and a clipboard in the other. As he lets the employees in through the still-locked door, he checks each one’s temperature and hands them a cloth face mask to wear that day.

Boxes of latex gloves are strategically placed throughout the store so employees can change them frequently, but the precious masks are limited to one per employee per day.

If any employee shows a fever, or any other potential symptom of coronavirus, they’re sent home and and told to try to arrange a test for COVID-19. If they test negative, they can come back to work. Test positive and they’re out of the rotation for 14 days minimum.

The manager isn’t required to check every employee’s temperature himself. That’s only mandatory for barber shops, tattoo parlors, day cares and health care facilities. But he wants to go the extra mile, to do everything he can to convince people it’s safe to shop in his store during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s not easy.

This is just one hypothetical scenario, one way Alabama business might choose to carry on in the coronavirus pandemic. So far, 22 million people have filed for unemployment benefits since the virus-related closures began, wiping out nearly 10 years of job gains in a month.

And it's increasingly looking like scenarios will vary from state to state, from city to city, even from business to business. But what is clear is that pressure is building to find a way to reopen the economy soon.

Push to reopen

“We want to get folks back to work as soon as we can, but we want to do it as smart as we can,” Governor Kay Ivey said in a press conference Tuesday.

Lift the restrictions too soon, and we could still end up with the hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths that the lockdowns were meant to prevent. The virus is still out there, smoldering embers in the population, needing only air and fuel to blaze up again.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced a three-phase schedule for when certain businesses might reopen, but left it up to state and local officials to decide when to begin that process and when to advance to the next phase. The plan also contained very few details about how those businesses might operate once open, often saying that they should continue to follow social distancing guidelines.

In Alabama, those decisions will be up to Ivey, the Alabama Department of Public Health and perhaps the Jefferson and Mobile County health departments.

A partial draft of a public health plan being developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency was leaked to the Washington Post earlier this week and offered more details about how those re-openings might happen, including how the country can greatly ramp up its testing and contact tracing capabilities.

Many of the country’s best-known think tanks and economists have also released their versions of re-opening plans, including things like widespread testing of people without symptoms, restrictions on travel and massive electronic contact tracing through cell phone apps, things that are not currently available, but might be in the coming months.

The business-focused American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Center for American Progress each published detailed plans. Neither is forecasting a quick return to normal, instead advocating a slow, deliberate stepping down of restrictions, ready to ramp back up until a vaccine or reliable treatment is developed.

Meanwhile, Alabama Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth on Friday announced a proposal to reopen many of Alabama's small businesses immediately, including small retail stores, restaurants and salons. Ivey said she is evaluating the plan.

But even that immediate Alabama plan calls for countless safeguards in distancing, cleaning and protective gear, a multitude of change that taken as a whole begin to construct a new normal, a world unlike the one before the lockdown.

AL.com reviewed all these plans. Here is a look at what life in Alabama might be like under some of the scenarios outlined there.

New normal: Shoe shopping

For that non-essential shoe store in Birmingham to stay open, shopping would be a different experience than most are used to. The store might have to install new hand sanitizer stations, limit occupancy, close off check-out lanes and use ropes or tape to block off areas where people might congregate. The store’s long benches could be put in storage and replaced with metal folding chairs spaced six feet apart.

The assistant manager could also become the store’s safety supervisor, in charge of overseeing all the store’s new social distancing and cleanliness protocol. It's a position that would be required under Ainsworth’s plan.

Those shoe store employees could be required to install and use a public health contact tracing app on their phones. Google and Apple are already collaborating to update their Android and iOS phone operating systems to incorporate these tracing apps, which would use Bluetooth signals to identify smartphones that have crossed paths in the past several days.

If a person with the app later tests positive, the app would send an alert to all the other smart phones that came within a few feet of that one over the past week, whether they came in contact at work or the grocery store or at church, so those people can be tested as well. The app might also deliver test results directly under some plans. The tracking app is unlikely to be mandatory, but varying restrictions or incentives have been floated to encourage use. Under some proposals, people would not be allowed to fly on an airplane or even take a COVID test without proving they have the app active on their phone.

An employee at the shoe store who tests positive would likely be asked to self-isolate for at least 7 days.

“Home isolation can be enforced using technology such as GPS tracking on cell phone apps,” the AEI plan states.

That plan also suggests that if the patient does not want to stay home during their isolation, because a family member is high risk or their home is not conducive to isolation, they could stay at one of several quarantine locations set up across the state. COVID-positive patients could stay in these converted hotels free of charge until their isolation period is over.

In the CDC plan, retail stores or other businesses could apply for an Infection Prevention Healthy Workplace Certification, an acknowledgment that the business has met the guidelines put in place for sanitation and social distancing. Inspectors trained by the CDC would grade businesses and post scores similar to a restaurant inspection.

If an employee returns to work too early from quarantine or other violations are discovered, they could lose the certificate, in addition to facing fines for violating state or local health orders. In some scenarios, the certificate would be mandatory for the business to remain open.

If blood antibody tests are proven effective at showing who may have immunity to the virus those may be used to certify people to go back to work in high-risk areas. But there are numerous unsettled issues. Evidence so far is not clear how accurate the tests are, if there is a threshold where people are at lower risk of infection or whether people who have already had COVID are immune and, if so, for how long.

New normal: Across Alabama

In Mobile, an out-of-work bartender could turn to the the federal government’s COVID-19 Corps, a New Deal-style initiative to put people to work fighting the disease. That's part of the CDC plan. Instead of pouring drinks on Dauphin Street, she would now be a public health worker doing contact tracing for the county health department, calling confirmed positive COVID patients to discuss who they may have come in contact with, notifying those people and scheduling them to be tested for the virus.

In Montgomery, churches could have alternating rows of pews roped off and pillows placed in the others, asking only family members to sit together. Collection baskets are passed around on long poles by gloved and masked ushers. Pastors could be tasked with urging their congregations to congregate a little less or risk facing tighter restrictions.

In Tuscaloosa, a hair stylist could face a new cleaning ritual in between customers. In accordance with the new guidelines, he might be required to scrub his hands, surgeon-style and don fresh latex gloves before going to the door to usher in each next customer. His N95 mask can last all day, but he’ll need a new one tomorrow.

All haircuts would be appointment-only, no walk-ins allowed. That's because waiting rooms might be closed completely, almost everywhere, with customers staying in their car until they are called to enter offices or businesses or barbershops. There'd be no more shared reading material to pass the time in doctor's offices and nail salons anyway, a part of Ainsworth’s plan. In the barbershop or salon, the total number of customers might be limited, and only half the usual number of stylists could work at any given time.

The salon would provide disposable paper masks for each customer that are secured over the ears to interfere with the haircut as little as possible. New plastic dividers could be installed to separate the hair cutting stations, though that might not be required.

In Birmingham, a fourth-year medical student at UAB might start advising routine patients from her apartment through a tele-medicine app. She wouldn’t normally be treating patients on her own like this, but the CDC plan allows for high-level medical, dental and nursing students to enter the work force early to ease the burden on the rest of the system, as well as increasing the capacity for tele-medicine. Many states are already allowing medical students to graduate early to help ease the burden on health care systems.

In Wilcox County, crews could step up efforts to roll out high-speed internet connection lines in rural areas funded by federal grants, as teachers begin mandatory training in online teaching.

Reopening schools and day cares is a top priority in the CDC/FEMA plan, so the parents can get back to work. If approved, Alabama's plan would restart daycares immediately, but with a “limitation of 11 children in a childcare facility at any time,” plus daily temperature checks for staff and stricter cleaning and distancing guidelines. While schools and daycares might soon meet in person, they could quickly shift back to online-only if a county or facility sees an outbreak.

Or maybe they close on a scheduled basis as a preventative measure. Since COVID patients can contract and spread the virus for several days before they would show symptoms, the CDC plan suggests scheduled surges in containment measures going forward. A community, city or state would schedule a week of significant restrictions every four weeks, to prevent outbreaks from spreading too far before large numbers of patients start testing positive. These surges would not be mandatory under the plan, but are recommended.

In Jefferson County, which operates under a local health authority, all people going out in public could be required to wear masks. In the rest of Alabama, masks might be recommended, not required.

These conditions would not be set by national standard, but by state and local governments, creating a patchwork quilt of rules and regulations across the country. Jefferson County, home to Birmingham, could set its own standards, which are more strict than Alabama’s statewide policies. Mobile County health officials also have the power to set local rules. The state might object.

In Homewood, an antique store owner might launch a major update to her web site, selling products online for the first time. She could qualify for a new federal grant and free training on how to bring more of her business online. Items could be delivered direct to customers’ houses or picked up at the store with minimal face-to-face contact.

Factories throughout Alabama could use federal grants to convert to producing face masks, gloves, face shields and other PPE, a conversion which is already underway at some facilities.

New normal: Worst case

In a worst-case scenario, the entire state could be forced to go back into lockdown if the number of cases spike, showing a doubling of cases every 3-5 days. The measures enacted in April could be reinstated, perhaps with additional restrictions to prevent the collapse of the state’s already taxed health care system, particularly in rural areas. Such a lockdown wouldn’t end until the number of new infections declines for 14 consecutive days.

The one common thread among the nationwide plans is that there is no “V-shaped recovery,” where the economy is quickly restored to what it was in February. All plans imagine some form of cyclical closures, lockdowns and limitations being necessary until a vaccine is developed or enough people develop immunity to the virus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top infectious disease doctor and member of Trump’s coronavirus task force told the Associated Press that parts of the country are “not there yet,” to be ready to reopen.

“I’ll guarantee you, once you start pulling back there will be infections. It’s how you deal with the infections that’s going count,” Fauci told the AP.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC, told The New York Times that reopening should not happen all at once.

“We need to reopen the faucet gradually, not allow the floodgates to reopen,” Frieden said. “This is a time to work to make that day come sooner.”