It’s been more than a month since COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns across the state and across the country.

We’re still fighting the pandemic and case numbers are only just now beginning to level off, but folks are still wondering – when will we be able to start reopening?

Health experts at Duke University weighed in on that question in an online forum this week.

“From our perspective, the people that are advocating that we eliminate social distancing right now and that we just completely open up the economy – what they’re really advocating for is that every single person in this country become infected with coronavirus,” says Duke medical professor Michael Gunn. “Because that’s what’s going to happen if we throw things wide open.

“If you like your grandmother, you might not want to do that.”

But that still leaves the question: when might we able to start reopening the economy, if not now?

Thomas Denny is the CEO of Duke’s Human Vaccine Institute. He says it won’t be safe to reopen until we start to see the number of new cases going down, in the same way we’ve been seeing them go up.

“We’ve spent about six weeks going up the curve, and I think we have to spend a lot of weeks going down the curve (first),” Denny says. “Most places, we’ve just barely plateaued, and it took many weeks to get up to that point – so you still have to go down the back side of that curve before your numbers are lower…

“I’m concerned that we’re going to find ourselves potentially in worse shape than we’ve been in the last six weeks, if we go too fast with this.”

Recent protests against the stay-at-home orders have gotten a lot of coverage, but public-opinion surveys show most Americans agree with the health experts. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling found that 69 percent of North Carolinians think the state’s response has been “about right,” while only 15 percent think the state has overreacted to the epidemic.

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