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10 U.S. States Have Now Begun To Reopen

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Ten governors just bet that reopening beats waiting on a vaccine.

With confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases closing in on 1 million, ten states moved on April 27 to start unwinding their stay-at-home orders and let specific businesses reopen their doors. Georgia, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, and Utah each rolled out their own version of a phased restart, ranging from salons and gyms to dine-in restaurants and movie theaters. The moves came days before the White House’s own recommended benchmark — a 14-day downward trend in case counts — had been clearly met in several of those states.

• Georgia allowed dine-in restaurants and movie theaters to reopen April 27, on top of salons, gyms, and tattoo parlors already cleared by Governor Brian Kemp, provided businesses follow social-distancing and sanitation rules.
• Tennessee let restaurants in 89 of its 95 counties reopen at 50% dine-in capacity on April 27, with retail stores set to follow within days.
• Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced the state’s stay-at-home order would expire April 30, clearing retail, restaurants, theaters, and malls to open at 25% occupancy starting May 1.

Georgia Leads the Most Aggressive Timeline

No state drew more scrutiny than Georgia. Kemp had already let salons, gyms, and tattoo parlors reopen earlier in the week, and on April 27 he extended that list to dine-in restaurants and movie theaters — businesses that put strangers in enclosed rooms for extended periods, exactly the kind of exposure risk public health officials had been warning about. The state’s guidance leaned on operators to enforce social distancing and sanitation themselves, with no statewide mask mandate forcing the issue.

Tennessee took a more staggered approach on the same day, reopening restaurants in the vast majority of its counties at half capacity while holding retail reopenings back for a later date. Texas went further out on the calendar: Abbott’s announcement set an actual expiration date, April 30, on the state’s stay-at-home order, with retail, dining, theaters, and malls cleared for 25% occupancy starting May 1 — a hard deadline that gave businesses several days to prepare rather than an immediate green light.

Alaska and Oklahoma Started Earlier

Alaska and Oklahoma weren’t new to this by April 27 — both had already begun letting select businesses operate before the rest of the ten-state wave caught up. Alaska had permitted retail, personal services, and limited restaurant dining, while Oklahoma had allowed personal care services like salons and barbershops to resume. South Carolina, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, and Utah rounded out the list, each writing its own rules for which storefronts could unlock their doors first.

The Federal Benchmark Everyone Skipped

The White House’s own reopening guidelines called for states to show a 14-day downward trajectory in case counts or positive test rates before entering what officials labeled Phase 1. Several of the states now moving weren’t there yet, and public health officials said so publicly. Testing capacity and contact tracing infrastructure in many of these states also hadn’t scaled up to the level experts said was necessary to catch a second wave before it spread widely.

Medical officials warned that reopening without meeting the 14-day downward trend or building out sufficient testing and contact tracing could trigger a fresh surge in infections and deaths just as mobility picked back up.

That tension — between governors eager to restart local economies and scientists warning the data wasn’t there yet — became the defining storyline of the week. It’s the same fault line that would later show up in states like states reimposing restrictions once infections spiked again, and it echoed the standoff playing out in Michigan, where residents were flooding the capitol to demand exactly this kind of reopening.

A Patchwork Rather Than a National Plan

With no single federal reopening order, each of the ten states set its own capacity limits, its own list of eligible businesses, and its own timeline — meaning a shopper in Nashville and a shopper in Atlanta were operating under entirely different rules on the same day. That patchwork approach put pressure on other governors watching from states still under full lockdown, wondering whether they’d been too cautious or whether Georgia and Texas had jumped too soon.

Texas’ May 1 deadline was the one to watch next: retail, restaurants, theaters, and malls at 25% occupancy statewide, with Abbott’s office signaling further phases would follow depending on how the numbers moved in the two weeks after reopening. Whether that data justified the next step, or forced a retreat, was the question hanging over every state on the list.