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President Trump’s decision to extend social distancing guidelines past Easter to the end of April was the right move. While the number of new cases are starting to show signs of decline in hot spots such as Washington state and New York City, new epicenters are emerging in Florida, Louisiana, Illinois and Michigan. Things will get worse in the coming weeks before they get better.

But Trump was also right to set a goal for a return to normalcy. The economic damage from the lockdown continues to grow: Some estimates suggest we may see 4 million to 6.5 million people lose their jobs in the weeks ahead. Americans are willing to hunker down at home and ride out this pandemic, but they need to see a light at the end of the tunnel. By setting a deadline, albeit one that was flexible, Trump effectively challenged medical experts to show us the path out of the wilderness.

Now they have done so. On Sunday, a team led by my American Enterprise Institute colleague, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb, released a “road map to reopening.” The report, written by former FDA officials and experts from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, lays out a clear path for an end to this crisis.

It does so in three phases:

PHASE 1: During Phase 1, which we are in now, we use “population-based mitigation,” or community isolation, i.e., closing schools, restaurants, museums and gyms, and asking everyone to stay home and cancel all nonessential travel and mass gatherings. This slows the spread of the virus and buys time to flatten the curve of the epidemic, increase testing capability and surge the hospital capacity we will need to transition to Phase 2.

PHASE 2: During this phase, we can move, on a state-by-state basis, to “case-based interventions,” or isolating individuals — using mass testing and contact tracing to isolate those who are infected, while allowing healthy people to go about their lives, much as South Korea has done.

The trigger for the transition from community to individual isolation will be when a state has shown a sustained reduction in cases for 14 days. A state must also have the capability in place to test everyone with symptoms, conduct active monitoring of those who test positive and their contacts, and safely treat everyone who requires hospitalization. This, Gottlieb and his team say, will require that we establish a national capacity to conduct at least 750,000 tests a week, and that we roughly double the number of acute-care beds and ventilators available to treat patients across the country.

Once these benchmarks are met, individual states can begin to slowly relax social distancing measures. Those with confirmed cases would be isolated for at least seven days, and their confirmed contacts would be quarantined and monitored for at least 14 days. The rest of us could return to work and to school.

However, even in this phase, life would not fully return to the way it was before the virus. The team recommends that individuals who can telework continue to do so, social gatherings still be limited to fewer than 50 people, and people maintain increased hygiene standards and even wear masks in public. And those at the highest risk — including the elderly and those with underlying conditions — would be asked to maintain social distancing until an effective treatment is developed.

If a state saw a sustained rise in cases for five days, Gottlieb and his team say, it should revert to Phase 1 and reinstate population-based mitigation. And while some states will be able to make the transition from community to individual isolation soon, the hardest-hit places where cases are still rising may need to maintain population-based mitigation for longer.

PHASE 3: Once an effective treatment — or better yet, a vaccine — becomes available, we can move to Phase 3 and lift all restrictions. At this point, we can begin to deal with this new coronavirus in the same way we deal with other viruses, such as seasonal flu.

This is the sustainable strategy to defeat the virus that Trump has been demanding. It answers the key question on the mind of everyone whose livelihoods and businesses have been devastated: When and how does this nightmare start to end? The answer, according to Gottlieb’s team, is that if we maintain social distancing guidelines through April 30 as Trump has ordered, the chains of epidemic spread can be broken, allowing some states to transition in May.

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: The report contains one final phase — Phase 4, “prepare for the next pandemic.” Because this virus won’t be the last.