May

There are only two scenarios in which the country reopens by May, according to Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic:

One involves the virus somehow turning out to be a less harmful pathogen than it has proved itself to be — an outcome experts told Mr. Pinsker is more or less unthinkable.

The other scenario involves the United States relaxing its social-distancing measures prematurely, allowing the virus to burn through the country. In a couple of months, the population would most likely exhibit some degree of herd immunity, but at the cost of potentially millions of lives.

The summer

Restrictions could safely ease by June, but only if the United States takes extraordinary measures, Zeke Emanuel, a health-policy expert and vice provost of the University of Pennsylvania, writes in The Times.

First, the Trump administration would need to issue a nationwide shelter-in-place order that lasts eight to 10 weeks: four for cases to peak, and another four to six for cases to decline to a level that the health care system could manage. As of now, only about three in four Americans have been ordered by state and local officials to stay home.

The federal government would have to use the shelter-in-place period to expedite the distribution of testing, protective gear, intensive-care equipment and training. It would also be essential to deploy a public works corps comprising thousands of people to test, isolate and trace the contacts of the infected and certify the immune.

Such a sweeping response would be, as The Times editorial board writes, “a Marshall Plan, an Apollo mission and a New Deal all rolled into one.” But if it could be managed, the country could start to slowly lift restrictions on children and young adults in a couple of months, Dr. Emanuel says. If the initial easing doesn’t cause hospitals to be overwhelmed, then more people could go back to work, and restaurants, bars and other venues could start operating at half their legal occupancy.

The need for strict social distancing could also decrease in June if the virus wanes in the summer months, as the flu does. As Sharon Begley writes at Stat, preliminary research has suggested the virus may indeed display some seasonal behavior, though it’s far from definitive.

The end of the year

The kind of response Dr. Emanuel and the editorial board call for is unlikely to happen, Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker argue in The Times. They predict that labs will start running low on essential chemical reagents in three to four weeks, dooming any suppression strategy that depends on widespread testing. The idea that the country will be able to mobilize its manufacturing resources to meet the demand for masks and ventilators in a matter of weeks is, in their view, also a false hope. The hard truth, the authors say, is that many hospitals will be overrun, and many people, including health care workers, will keep dying.