One of the strange things about the current emergency is that, as much as I wish it were over, I feel no little anxiety about what will happen when it is. Or rather, what will happen when it is announced to be over. My concern is whether such an announcement will truly seem based on what will be able to be described as my and my family’s best interests or whether the interests of CEOs, politicians, and others with a much readier supply of N-95 masks and hand sanitizer will seem to have interposed themselves.

I am concerned, in other words, that “the end” might suddenly heave into view like a surfacing whale, a sudden dangerous fact too large to be ignored, too close to back down from, and difficult to maneuver around with any degree of finesse.

Considering the deep redness of the state where I live, our governor can be said to have taken dramatic enough virus countermeasures to suggest that he possesses at least some desire to be his own man. Still, with the release of the president’s plan, an increasing number of protests against social-distancing measures, and the president’s self-contradiction-by-tweets calling for various swing states to “liberate” themselves, there is across the nation what feels like gathering momentum toward some degree of easing of the current restrictions and a return to what a certain kind of person insists on thinking of as “normal” but which the rest of us are settling into thinking of as “the before.”

We hear that a handful of northeastern governors are working together on a “reopening plan,” and a headline I saw in the last couple of days suggested that even Fauci was looking on such moves with some degree of approval. To be sure, to the question of “how soon,” it seems likely that the findings of these governors and of Fauci and his colleagues is most likely to be “not very.” Nonetheless, the casual and/or undiscerning news consumer (i.e., many politicians and sizable swaths of their supporters), may now be forming the sense that this first phase of the emergency is on the verge of being concluded, that we are about to be “over the hump,” that, perhaps, “the worst is over.”

One of our biggest handicaps in all of this is that so many of our imaginations are simply not up to the task of contemplating an unhappy ending. The last hundred years of history have made it easy for Americans to form the impression, even if only subconsciously, that it is almost a law of the universe that America is owed success, that innovation and invention will save us as if through the operation of some inexorable physical law.

So it is that, as we mouth some variation of the phrase “this can’t go on forever,” we overlook evidence that the most accurate way to continue that sentence would not be with words like “and therefore soon everything will be better” but rather with words like “without severe economic damage that might nonetheless be unavoidable, assuming we can maintain consensus on not wanting to needlessly cause the death of additional hundreds of thousands of people, because, from an epidemiological standpoint, nothing really changes about either our infection risk or the measures necessary to reduce that risk until the release of a vaccine, which is still at least a year out.”

In the worst case, it might turn out that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is not the only one of this nation’s so-called leaders whose outlook is that “you’re going to see states inevitably follow, because one or two states do it [and] the other states are kind of going to be at a disadvantage.” There is in other words a real possibility that whatever “reopening” starts happening will be triggered not by sound public-health advice but by the psychological pressures of a nationwide game of economic chicken being played by moral cowards.

It is somewhat reassuring to hear  this state’s governor say “I don’t want to send everyone dancing out into the streets quite yet” and that “we don’t do anything if we think or the experts are telling me that it is going to endanger us.”

But only somewhat.

* * * * *

A friend of mine from high school died last summer at his home in England. On Easter Sunday, another old friend got in touch to advise that he and the decedent’s mother are planning a memorial event for June 15, a date he blithely captioned as “post-COVID.”

“I’m hoping we can make it a two-day affair cause there will be people from France and the UK flying in plus all over America,” he wrote, claiming that the confirmed guest list already included our friend’s widow, who would be one of the ones flying in from the UK.

This plan struck me as utterly disconnected from reality, so I screen-shotted part of the exchange and forwarded it to another mutual friend to see what he thought.

“We are still hoping to travel in June and July, so I guess I’m hopeful,” he answered.

These are all intelligent people, so I am forced to consider why we seem to see such different possibilities in the same set of facts. If the current restrictions are warranted by the facts as they are understood now, what is it about these facts that can reasonably be expected to change quickly enough that we can contemplate a return to discretionary travel and large social gatherings as soon as early summer?

Perhaps my one friend was overstating the widow’s commitment to attending on this particular date. Certainly it is hard to imagine a well-informed adult buying an air ticket for two months out from now. And yet my other friend told me that he and his family—which includes an asthmatic—are “hopeful” on a similar point.

What can reasonably be hoped for, exactly? As mentioned earlier, there seems no reason to hope for a vaccine any sooner than a year from now, possibly not even then, and at any rate certainly not by this summer. To me, this means that nothing about the basic infection-risk picture can change by then either. The only thing that will have changed will be the shape of “the curve,” but of course any flattening thereof will only have been the result of the stringent restrictions we are currently under and—in the absence of a vaccine—would be quickly reversed as soon as those restrictions were appreciably loosened.

There are some not completely unreasonable possibilities that could conceivably nibble at the edges of all of this. Perhaps, as the data picture firms up, it will turn out that the virus’s infection or death rates are not quite as high as first feared. Perhaps extremely effective treatments—and paths to distributing them efficiently at massive scale—will be devised. Perhaps—despite counter evidence from southern hemisphere countries where the virus is going gangbusters—there will turn out to be some noticeable degree of seasonality to this virus.

Even if all of these possibilities come true, my willingness to actually risk contracting the virus—and thus risk transmitting it to my family, including my elderly parents, not to mention any number of other people’s loved ones I might encounter before showing symptoms—will not be appreciably increased. And all of these possibilities won’t come true, not all at once, of course. Not by summer, anyway.

The most it seems reasonable to hope for by early summer, then, is that our restrictions will be having a strong effect. But it seems to me that that will be an argument for continuing most of those restrictions, not abandoning them.

* * * * *

My friends’ “hope” in the face of all this makes the ground feel unstable under my feet. If even they have not yet concluded that summer travel and socializing as usual are not off the table, how prevalent must such hopes be among the general population?

In other words, how much hope is there of not getting sucked into the aforementioned game of interstate economic chicken by a collection of governors and state legislators comprising a considerable number who campaigned on their unwillingness to be persuaded to action by anything other than ideology and certainly not by some dumb fact?

When the loosening begins, we can be sure it will be led by politicians mainly motivated by concerns around economic harm and not by evidence of a significantly decreased infection risk.

First through the gate will be states whose governors have simply decided to require a greater degree of sacrifice from the poor and the vulnerable in service of something they conceive of as “the greater good.”

The rest will follow in an order dictated by where they fall along a continuum of the number of otherwise unnecessary deaths they are willing to tolerate as part of the same calculation.

And many of us will then be forced to decide whether each of our state’s leaders have enough of our individual best interests at heart that we feel comfortable following their lead, or whether we think it seems more sensible to follow our own instincts, even if those instincts require actions that will have increasingly less cover of law.

It will be particularly interesting to see what happens, for example, in states that decide to reopen schools before summer, as our governor, for one, has refused to say he won't do, because “the children need hope.” Given that, again, I can’t see any likely developments that would make of reopened schools anything other than a massive infection vector (and cause the profoundly unhealthy teachers and school support employees to die like flies), our household has already decided we wouldn’t go along with any such order. Will we be considered truancy scofflaws? Will our children be held back?

No doubt ours is not the only household scanning the horizon uneasily, waiting for this whale to heave into sight.