When can we let up? Health experts craft strategies to safely relax coronavirus lockdowns

With countries from Italy to the U.S. having waited too long to combat the coronavirus, many experts in public health and epidemiology are pleading with government officials not to compound the mistake by lifting stay-at-home and other social distancing measures too soon — and, in fact, to impose strict ones in U.S. states and cities that haven’t.

But from the World Health Organization to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to epidemiology modelers across the globe, there is growing recognition that the time will and must come to tiptoe back toward normalcy.

That recognition is driving the next life-and-death questions in the coronavirus pandemic: What is the exit strategy? How will we know when it’s safe to implement it? If this first wave of outbreak eventually crests and dissipates, as it has in China, what’s the plan if the virus returns with a vengeance in a few months? Can that plan be less disruptive to livelihoods and ordinary existence than the panicked responses in many western countries over the last month, and more like the surgical strikes that seem to have succeeded in Singapore and South Korea?

The “when can we?” research, unfortunately, is playing out against a highly politicized background. President Trump on Tuesday vowed to return the country to “normal” by Easter, April 12. But while the epidemic in the U.S. is still far from under control, much less peaking, apolitical experts are nevertheless cautiously starting to figure out how smarter, targeted approaches could serve as an off-ramp for the current control measures and how to do better next time, especially if Covid-19 cases rebound