[credit_guy]

I think as soon as serology tests become widely available and cheap, lots of people will get a "certificate of immunity" and be allowed/encouraged to return to work. My thinking is that in 3 months (i.e. around end of June), lots of people will be back to work.

In the US in particular, public schools get money from the federal government conditional on administering state tests. It doesn't look like the stimulus bill is leaving them off the hook, so schools have a very big incentive to give the test by the end of the school year (around 25-June). There was no official statement that state exams are cancelled for this year, and what's more my son's teacher resumed the exam prep with the kids yesterday.

So, I'm not sure when stores will open, but I give a more than 50-50 chance that schools will open at some point before the Summer vacation, maybe second half of June or early July, in order to give the state exams.

[dont__panic]

This does largely depend on state. See that NYS has cancelled state exams, and is weighing the options on the graduation-requirement Regents exams: https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2020/03/20/its-official-new-y...

Meanwhile, NYC's mayor has suggested that it's unlikely for schools to resume this school year at all: https://www.silive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/mayor-nyc-schools...

Definitely depends on your region, though. I think you might be jumping the gun a bit w.r.t. serology tests -- consider that the entire United States can only complete something like 20,000 tests per day right now, we're likely going to have to wait for normal tests (like what we're doing now) to become less important before we can even begin to focus resources on serology tests. And when only a small portion of the population has caught COVID, it's still going to be very important to test flu-like illnesses and isolate contacts of infected individuals for months.

[credit_guy]

You are correct. I didn't know that, and now I found the actual statement from the NY DOE

http://www.nysed.gov/news/2020/statement-board-regents-chanc...

As for serology tests, I may be jumping the gun, but only a bit. My employer started paying for coronavirus home test kits in the UK, with the aim of having people come back to work if they show the antibodies. They don't have anything similar in the US simply because there's no FDA approved similar kit. But this will probably change soon.