President Trump has expressed optimism that cities and states can quickly lift restrictions and reopen their economies shuttered by the pandemic. But on Wednesday, Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. officials took a much more measured view, saying they hope for a limited return to normal in the nation’s capital in late May — but that it could also be delayed into the summer months.

The announcement came at a public townhall discussion for Bowser’s Reopen D.C. Advisory Group, which has been created to chart a course for how and when to reopen the city. While the current stay-at-home order is set to expire on May 15, a presentation used by D.C. Department of Health director LaQuandra Nesbitt cautioned that “opening non-essential businesses before May 25 will most likely create a second, larger peak of infections.”

In the most stringent of circumstances, Nesbitt’s presentation said current restrictions will have to be extended for at least three months, pushing any possible reopening of the city into late June or early July. Under a more optimistic outlook, a limited reopening could start by early June. But even that would be restrictive: non-essential businesses and schools would have to keep social distancing rules in place, bars and restaurants would likely remain shuttered, and employers would keep relying on telework.

Bowser made clear that reopening would be a process: “Don’t anticipate a light switch going on and everything going back to normal,” she said.

City officials said any decision on when to start a phased reopening will follow specific metrics, including a 14-day decline in positive case counts, expanded testing and contact tracing capacities, and having an appropriate number of available hospital beds and sufficient protective equipment on hand. And while Nesbitt said D.C.’s current case count of 4,000 positives is below where some models said the city would be at this point, she said there’s been no consistent decline in the rates, and the city is still falling short on the other metrics.

On the availability of hospital beds, D.C. is at 65% acute-care capacity; health officials say it would need to be at 75% to consider lifting restrictions. And on personal protective equipment, the city is still operating with a fraction of the N95 masks it says it needs to keep up with demand in hospitals. Hiring has started to beef up the corps of contact tracers that can identify and isolate positive cases when they happen, and testing — while still limited — has been increasing in recent weeks.

Nesbitt also said that blood testing for antibodies — which could indicate whether someone has had COVID-19 — could begin as early as next week, though she did warn that the science remains “unsettled or unclear about what it means to have antibodies,” especially for immunity from the virus.

Regardless, Bowser said that she’s not yet going to announce whether the stay-at-home order will be extended; that decision will come closer to May 15, since it will depend on whether the city’s metrics have changed substantially or not. And any decision on when to reopen the city will likely be made in conjunction with Maryland and Virginia, a point made by Gov. Larry Hogan during an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday night.

“The virus doesn’t recognize state borders or international borders. In our area we’re very close with Washington, D.C. and Virginia. We’re all working in conjunction with one another to make sure that we’re sort of on the same page, because many of our people live in one jurisdiction, work in another and they travel back and forth on the same Metro system. If somebody opens up all the bars and restaurants, everybody from our state will go over there and bring it back,” he said.

Also speaking on Wednesday, D.C. Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt, who has seen the pandemic-related closures dry up revenue for the city, sided with the go-it-slow approach to reopening, cautioning that doing so too quickly could lead to another shutdown later on.

“A second shutdown is really, really costly,” he said.

That point was echoed by Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security who was chosen to co-chair Bowser’s Reopen D.C. Advisory Group.

“The challenge we have here is we want to reopen soon,” he said. “We understand people are suffering, they are impatient and they need to get back to work. At the same time we want to make sure we do so in a way that does not reinvigorate the virus or put us in peril.”