It's wishful thinking about how it will turn out (clearly it's not working out like people wanted) with a lot of magical thinking, and political expediency. The

It's wishful thinking about how it will turn out (clearly it's not working out like people wanted) with a lot of magical thinking, and political expediency. The economy is hurting, and if you are a leading politician, you want the economy to improve, for people to see there is an end in sight and that we can go back to normal. All these motivations can be true at the same time. America is so polarized and so many stupid people are convinced that there's some political basis behind the fact that masks prevent spreading, that the US won't be able to just recover from this until we have some combination of effective treatment and/or vaccines. We'll continue to have a lot of big cities, mostly liberal places probably, where people try to distance and wear masks (but not enough). Magical thinking won't make this go away, unlike a lot of other things that you can wish away or ignore when you are in a really rich country.