It’s Aug. 1, more than three months from now. New Jersey is just beginning to shake off the coronavirus quarantine and get back to normal life.

Restaurants are filled with diners at tables spaced 6 feet apart. Workers are back in their office buildings with Purell still available at every turn. Beaches, boardwalks and parks are teeming with children running off months of pent-up energy.

Social distancing restrictions have been loosened, even as a few hundred coronavirus cases linger across the state.

And that’s when all hell breaks loose. Again.

The second wave of coronavirus infections starts sweeping the state, again overwhelming hospitals, again adding hundreds of fatalities to the state total and again hurtling New Jersey into strict shelter-at-home mandates.

It’s a doomsday scenario. But it’s one that public health officials and epidemiologists say is the future if residents don’t take today’s lockdown and distancing requirements seriously.

We can stop this from happening, but we might not like what we’ll have to give up to get there.

The pathway out of the current quarantine could take a series of extreme measures, some of which aren’t even in place yet. They include aggressive large-scale contact tracing, like tracking the movement of your cellphone, widespread testing and data collection, and developing a better understanding of potential immunity to the virus.

Those measures could provide a way for the state to begin gradually lifting restrictions and easing into reopening, experts said. But for that to happen — for parks and beaches and restaurants and schools to open again — health officials first will have to see a prolonged decline in infections, hospitalizations and fatalities.

Even then, lifting restrictions will require a delicate balance to safeguard against a potentially even more catastrophic second wave of infections, experts said.

“What you don’t want to do is lift everything, have everyone rush back to what normal was before the quarantine and then have a dramatic second peak — an acceleration of new cases again,” said Stephanie Silvera, an epidemiologist and professor at Montclair State University.

No single measure is going to stop the spread of the virus or help New Jersey get back to normal.

But the state government can and should be doing more, health experts say.

Novel ideas for a novel virus

It takes plenty of good old-fashioned detective work to do successful contact tracing, which experts say is one of the most important measures in fighting the spread of the coronavirus.

The first step is identifying every person infected, then pinpointing and tracking down anyone who might have been in contact with them going back a few days. The tracing goes on and on and on — from contact to contact to contact — until everyone who has been exposed to an infected person is notified and urged to isolate.

It’s arduous work — lots of list-making, phone calls and interviews. But aggressive, large-scale tracing is essential to helping New Jersey emerge from quarantine, experts said.

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“By doing this, you’re taking the virus out of circulation,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “And the virus thrives off people coming into contact with one another.”

It’s also an area where New Jersey can be doing better, some experts said. In northern counties, the outbreak of the virus has gotten so out of control it’s becoming nearly impossible to effectively contact-trace. But Shaman and others said the state — and country — should consider implementing more aggressive contact tracing methods that have been successful in stopping the spread of the virus in some Asian countries.

In South Korea, legislation allows health officials to closely monitor the footsteps of citizens who test positive for an emerging infectious disease, including using credit-card records, GPS data from cellphones and car navigation systems.

In Singapore, people who contract the coronavirus also are required by law to download an app that traces their movements.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a country built on personal freedoms, such measures would be difficult to imagine. But both South Korea and Singapore have been credited for drastically slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

“If you look globally at countries that have put much more extreme measures into place, there is evidence they seem to work in terms of moving through this quicker,” Silvera said.

Silvera and Shaman said contact tracing can be most effective in areas where the virus is not yet widespread. In New Jersey, five counties have fewer than 300 reported cases.

But it still can be effective in large urban areas where the virus already has taken root, they said. It just requires aggressive measures not common in the U.S.

More testing, a better understanding

As New Jersey hospitals are filled with new coronavirus cases, the focus is on keeping pace with staffing, protective masks, ventilators and ICU beds. But for the state to emerge from quarantine, health experts said, they need to better understand the virus itself.

Specifically, is a portion of the state immune to COVID-19 — and how big might that swath be? Are people immune to the virus once they’ve had it and recovered? How many people tested positive but were asymptomatic? Those answers can help inform whether the outbreak in New Jersey is under control, or how much more needs to be done.

“People want a simple answer, and they want to know, ‘When can life just be normal again?’” Silvera said. “But the reality is, it’s complex situation with a lot of variables that are still being worked out.”

To get those answers, the state needs data — and much more of it. Widespread testing and rapid testing across the entire state needs to ramp up at a fast pace, Silvera and other experts said. To date, residents across New Jersey have complained about the lack of access to testing, with long lines and early closures at the few federal sites. Experts estimate New Jersey could have thousands more positive coronavirus cases than are being reported.

“Until we have a better handle on who’s sick, who’s been sick and is long term immunity possible, it’s really difficult to guess at is this (quarantine) going to May or July or August or something that goes into September,” Silvera said.

Getting back to normal

The signs New Jersey is ready to begin gradually easing restrictions will be clear, experts said. The state will need to report a steady decline in the number of new coronavirus cases and have a sustained decline in the number of new cases for at least two weeks. The hospitalization rate and number of fatalities also will be in steady decline over at least a few weeks.

The more difficult question will be which restrictions to lift first.

Julie Swann, a professor at N.C. State and an expert in health systems, infectious disease modeling and logistics, said New Jersey will likely ease into a rollback, starting with opening outdoor spaces such as parks and beaches, lifting recommendations on wearing masks and slowly allowing slightly larger groups of people to congregate. She also said the state could see businesses and sporting events that bring in smaller crowds reopen before larger ones.

“That could be some smaller restaurants before bars that could be packed,” Swann said. “It might mean high school sports games before pro games.”

Swann and others also said elementary schools could be the first to reopen in New Jersey based on the rate of infectivity in kids, combined with the disruption for parents trying to work. Other places more vulnerable to infection — such as retirement or nursing homes — could be among the last to get back to normal.

Experts said decisions on lifting restrictions likely will be made on a state-by-state basis. New Jersey, however, will need to work closely with New York and Pennsylvania.

“New Jersey is unique in that we are so connected to the economies of both New York and Philadelphia,” Silvera said. “So whatever we’re going to do needs to be done in concert with what’s happening with the states that our population commutes to most commonly for work.”

If researchers discover a population that has a level of immunity to the coronavirus, that group could be among the first to return to work outside of their homes, experts said.

The biggest fear in rolling back restrictions is doing so too fast and making the state vulnerable to a second wave of infection. The first public spaces, businesses or schools to reopen should also be those that can be closed again quickly if a spike in infection resurfaces, experts said.

“Whatever we do, we’re going to take really small baby steps,” Silvera said.

“We want to be hopeful that this can go quicker,” she added. “But I don’t think that’s a realistic message at this point. We need to get people prepared emotionally to be doing this longer than most of us had hoped.”

NJ Advance Media staff writer Rebecca Everett contributed to this story.

Matthew Stanmyre may be reached at mstanmyre@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattStanmyre. Find NJ.com on Facebook.