No. I know people like to hope, it's my name, after all. But, no, you can't hope away a virus.
The virus is still easily transmissible. That has never changed, and if anything the base R0 has increased from 2 to 3. With all the restrictions, we got the R down to like .7. That's great! We gave ourselves time to evaluate where we are, learn what we could, and prepare our hospitals. We were flying blind in Feb/March. We had to lock down so we could figure out where we were. Turned out we got lucky, and the virus had not penetrated as far as we thought. Mostly, on the coasts and not in a volume to get the spike everyone was worried about. Now, where is the virus? Everywhere. Volume, who knows?
The R won't stay at .7 without restrictions. It won't stay at .7 without a vigorous test, trace, isolate which most communities seem unwilling or unable to do. We will not be through this pandemic until we can A. Eliminate it completely. Islands can do this. Places with open borders can not. B. Immunity C. Vaccine. D. It mutates itself out of existence. The most likely options, B & C are going to take 1-2 years. Even if we get a vaccine in 6 months, the time and resources it will take to distribute it to the population won't happen overnight.
What is frustrating to me, is that people see the restrictions being lifted and think this is close to being over. We are at the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. We're at the end of Act 1, not the start of Act 3. We can probably loosen restrictions somewhat, because the hospitals are well below capacity. We have the "freedom" to infect more people, but that doesn't mean going back to the "way things were." We do that, we're back where we were in January, only with thousands of more starting points instead of the couple dozen that we had then. In 6-8 weeks, the same unfavorable outcome. All this phase talk, give the impression that we're going to do phase 1 for a month, and then move to phase 2, and then we'll be onto phase 3 a short time later, and then we're done.
There are still millions of people who have yet to be infected, so we will be back to the same set of ethical questions that The Mom is tired of us talking about, so don't worry, I'm not. The virus' capability to spread hasn't changed, we've just done a "better than expected" job of depriving it of food (people) while we regrouped. This is worth celebrating, but it's not the end. Politicians have many reasons for not wanting to advertise that reality, people have many reasons for not wanting to think about it. But the virus, only needs two things, which it will have, bodies and time. I hate to be a downer, but I don't want people to be emotionally unprepared when the skies darken again.