Almost since the moment he issued guidelines for combatting Covid-19 through social distancing, in mid-March, President Donald Trump has been pressing to reopen the country. This week, his push has reached a fever pitch as right-wing demonstrators took to the streets – from California to Kentucky, North Carolina, Wyoming, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio – in protest (and defiance) of stay-at-home orders. On Wednesday, Trump, who had previously said that decisions about “rejuvenating the economy” will focus on protecting “health and life,” announced: “You already know we’ll be opening up states, some states much sooner than others, and we think some of the states can actually open up before the deadline of May 1.” (On Thursday afternoon, the president said that decisions about when to loosen social distancing restrictions would be left to individual states, contradicting statements he’d made earlier in the week.) Experts, including those in the government, have indicated that reopening the country too soon will actually threaten “health and life.” On Tuesday, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cautioned that if mitigation strategies in certain areas of the country are relaxed too quickly, outbreaks in major cities across the United States could follow. He also warned of worse to come in the months ahead. “We’re definitely going to have a second wave,” he said, predicting that Covid-19 cases would peak again late in the year.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned that the United States may experience multiple surges of Covid-19 over the next year and half, noting that while it’s impossible to know for certain, the coronavirus seems to be following a “1918 model” — a reference to the 1918 flu pandemic that may have killed up to 100 million people worldwide. “This first wave … is just the beginning of what could easily be 16 to 18 months of substantial activity of this virus around the world, coming and going, wave after wave,” Osterholm, who served as a State Department science envoy for health security from 2018 through 2019, said during a recent online conference. “It surely is a virus that likely will have to infect at least 60 to 70 percent of the population before you’re going to see a major reduction in its transmission,” he explained. Similarly, a study by researchers at Harvard University, published this week in the journal Science, warned of “recurrent wintertime outbreaks” of Covid-19, meaning the virus may become a seasonal, global fixture. If those infected develop short-term immunity (on the order of 40 weeks), we may see annual outbreaks of Covid-19 while longer-term immunity (two years) would likely mean biennial outbreaks. Without effective new vaccines or therapeutics, achieving population immunity to Covid-19 may be impossible in the short term, leading the researchers to project that intermittent social distancing efforts — such as stay-at-home orders and school closures — may be necessary into 2022. Such measures are currently needed to “flatten the curve” and thereby prevent the U.S. health care system from being overwhelmed by the pandemic, but effective social distancing will leave a pool of people who are susceptible to Covid-19 precisely because they haven’t yet been exposed to it. If social distancing is relaxed, a new surge in cases may prompt the reinstitution of such control measures.