Europe's plans for going back to work start to take shape

Austria and Denmark are beginning to open up some schools and shops this week and President Emmanuel Macron on Monday night told the French that he wants to ease restrictions from May 11. Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to discuss her plans with German state premiers on Wednesday while the European Commission has drafted a plan to coordinate the moves.

Governments are trying to balance the desperate need to halt the damage to the economy against the risk of a resurgence of the pandemic. The number of new cases in Europe has stabilized in recent days though more than 50,000 people have died on the continent and the fatalities continue to climb.

Italy has extended containment measures until May 3, and named the former chief executive officer of Vodafone Group to head a team that will help the country's firms to gradually restart activity. Spain reported the lowest number of new cases since March 20 on Tuesday, increasing pressure on the government to relax its state of emergency.

Even as leaders are planning a gradual removal of the restrictions on economic activity, the path is fraught with peril. The commission warned that they will have to be prepared to re-impose lockdowns if the number of infections starts to spike again.

In guidelines to be unveiled Wednesday, the commission will warn that the easing should be gradual and begin only when infections significantly decreased for a sustained period of time; hospitals have enough beds, drugs and equipment; and large-scale testing, tracing and quarantine capacity is in place.

Measures for older adults should stay in force for longer and the commission also recommends the use of mobile phone applications to warn people if they come near to an infected person.

"When will we be able to go back to the way things were?" Macron said in his television address. "In all honesty, in all humility, we don't have a definitive answer to that."

The crisis is widely seen as more serious than Great Recession of the late 2000s and there is little sense of international coordination among the Group of Seven or G-20 governments despite repeated talk of doing "whatever it takes." G-7 finance chiefs will hold a call later today.

The euro-area economy is set to shrink more than 10% in the first half of this year, according to Bloomberg's monthly survey. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire put his country's contraction at 8%.

As one of the first countries in Europe to shut down, Austria is now a much-watched example of how to go about the task of re-opening itself up again -- and it will be an agonizingly slow and complicated process.

Austrians lined up outside hardware and gardening stores on Tuesday morning as the country became one of the first to ease lockdown measures. Face masks are mandatory in all shops as well as in public transport. If there's no pickup in infections all other stores can reopen May 2 with schools to follow.

Volkswagen AG's Audi plans to reopen its factory in Gyor, western Hungary, on Tuesday, Kisalfold news website reports, citing a video message from board chairman Alfons Dintner.

On Wednesday, Denmark will reopen primary schools and hospitals will start to conduct non-critical procedures for patients suffering from conditions other than Covid-19.

One of the many effects of the virus has been highlighting the deficiencies of the bloc, with the old tensions between the frugal north and the debt-addled south returning. Italy and Spain, have been the worst-affected countries, and are looking for financial help and solidarity without the kind of conditions that the Dutch insist on.

Italy is considering allowing some companies in the automobile, fashion, design and metalworking sectors to reopen later this month but the priority remains the health of employees, according to two officials who asked not to be named discussing confidential plans. Unions are more reluctant than business managers to reopen, and the government is being urged to be cautious.

"Italy is pretty much like the first competitor to head down the ski run, because of our long lockdown," Luca Richeldi, a pulmonologist at Rome's Agostino Gemelli hospital and a member of the scientific and medical committee advising the government, said in an interview.

On the fringes of the European Union, the U.K. is the main laggard having delayed imposing tight restrictions and seen key officials including Prime Minister Boris Johnson infected. The U.K. is projecting that the British outbreak won't reach its peak until later this week and the government is due to review its exit strategy on Thursday.

Having spent years extricating itself from the bloc, the post-Brexit reality is that the U.K. is pursuing its own political experiment on how to manage the virus. Its future trade relationship with the U.S. and the EU is still entirely up in the air.

In Germany, the leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur that she's likely to scrap plans for a special conference to select a candidate for chancellor next year and will instead wait for the party's regular gathering in December.

Germany's public health authority sounded a note of caution too. Testing slowed down over the four-day Easter holiday weekend, making official case tallies less reliable, Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute, warned in a briefing.

Even when the number of fatalities across the continent show real signs of slowing down, there is a lingering feeling that when things turned bad, it was every nation for itself -- and that will be a political question mark hanging over the bloc in the future.

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Bloomberg's Boris Groendahl, Ania Nussbaum, Nikos Chrysoloras, Alexander Weber, Morten Buttler and Naomi Kresge contributed to this report.