President Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom have been mutually complimentary during the coronavirus crisis, but they are on a collision course when it comes to how long to keep social distancing measures in place to blunt the pandemic.

Californians could find themselves caught in the middle as Trump’s stated desire to start returning to normal by mid-April conflicts with what they hear from Newsom. The governor issued a stay-at-home order last week and said he wouldn’t back off before seeing evidence that the state has begun to “bend the curve” of the pandemic.

On Tuesday, Newsom said an April restart “would be sooner than any of the experts that I talk to believe is possible.”

“It’s going to confuse people,” said Lee Riley, a professor of infectious disease and vaccinology at UC Berkeley. “The only way to make it clear to people is to have a more uniform message.”

Trump said Tuesday that he wants the U.S. economy to be “raring to go” by Easter, April 12. The 15-day period for social distancing measures he suggested this month — including avoiding gatherings of more than 10 people, skipping discretionary travel and staying away from bars and restaurants — ends Monday. He hasn’t said whether people should stick to those measures, which are now far more lenient than orders in place in California and several other states, in the 13 days between Monday and Easter.

There are few signs that the pandemic is easing — in fact, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, one of the hardest-hit places, said Tuesday that his state’s rate of infections is increasing. Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said Monday: “I want America to understand — this week, it’s going to get bad.”

Trump, however, is at the forefront of politicians who see soaring unemployment numbers and plunging 401(k) accounts and warn that “the cure” — shutting down vast sectors of the economy indefinitely — is “worse than the problem.”

“I gave it two weeks,” Trump said Tuesday at a Fox News virtual town hall event. “We can socially distance ourselves and go to work.”

Trump didn’t cite any epidemiological predictions in choosing Easter to be the nation’s restart date. Instead, he obliquely praised the symbolism of the day Christians celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

“You’ll have packed churches all over our country,” he said. “I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

Trump is letting the economy guide his decisions “because the condition of the pocketbook re-elects presidents,” David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University, said Tuesday. “The perception of past versus future economic conditions at home seems to matter most to voters.”

Medically speaking, however, relaxing social distancing guidelines that soon “would be risky,” Riley said.

“Look at what is happening — the pandemic is still on the upswing,” Riley said. “Look at how long it took China and Hong Kong and Singapore to control the increase in cases. The U.S. is no different.”

Newsom says he is consulting scientific models tracking the pandemic’s path, which suggest the worst is yet to come and that measures to keep society isolated could be required for several months.

Newsom said he is operating not just on a different timeline from Trump when it comes to the outbreak, but on an entirely “different playing field.” He has made it clear he doesn’t see the crisis resolving anytime soon.

The governor predicted last week that schools would not reopen before the summer break, and he has cited models developed by state health officials that estimate more than half of Californians will be infected by the coronavirus without extreme isolating measures.

Newsom said Tuesday evening in a Facebook Live event that it would be “misleading” to think California could relax its stay-at-home guidelines by April. He said it would be at least six weeks before the state could make adjustments.

“April, for California, would be sooner than any of the experts that I talk to would believe is possible,” Newsom said.

His focus on the public health response has created its own uncertainty for residents wondering when they can resume normal life. Newsom’s stay-at-home order has no end date, and he has offered no specific criteria for lifting it.

“When we bend the curve and we see that we’re getting our arms around this,” Newsom said Monday, “then we’ll be able to ask that question.”

He has avoided any suggestion of conflict with Trump, and the president has praised Newsom at several of his coronavirus news briefings. Newsom said his many conversations with the president and the substantial resources California has received from the federal government suggest that Trump understands the state’s challenges.

“I have no trepidation that, whatever he decides to do from a national prism, will get in the way of our efforts here at the state level to do what we need to do to hit this head-on,” Newsom said.

Cuomo appeared to chart a middle course Tuesday when he argued that the country doesn’t have to choose between economic ruin and mass death.

The New York governor conceded Trump’s argument that it would be “unsustainable” to “close down the economy. ... But if you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say, ‘Accelerate the economy at the cost of human life.’ Because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

Cuomo said it will soon be time, however, to start to “refine” the “blunt” public health strategy of sheltering everyone in place.

“Lower-risk individuals do not need to be quarantined, and they shouldn’t be quarantined with an older person who they may be transferring it to,” Cuomo said. Instead, he said, “let the younger people go back to work. Let the recovered people go back to work ... and then ramp up the economy with those individuals.”

Doing so, Cuomo said, would be a way to refine “your public health strategy at the same time you’re restarting your economy. Those two can be consistent if done intelligently.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com, alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli, @akoseff