In New Jersey, residents can go to drive-in movies, church services and other "gatherings of vehicles" starting Wednesday, and curbside retail will resume within days, the governor announced.
In Louisiana, restaurants can open their doors over the weekend to a quarter of their former capacity, with reservations-only dining in New Orleans.
But in northern Virginia, the governor has put into place two more weeks of stay-at-home rules as other parts of the state reopen. Across the Potomac in Washington, D.C., the mayor is continuing restrictions until at least June 8.
As the U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grow, an increasingly complicated patchwork of regulations is growing, governing where residents can go and what they can do as regions lift some restrictions and clamp down on others.
The moves come as health experts have sounded the alarm on the dangers of reopening before there is widespread testing and contract tracing.
"There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in testimony to a Senate committee this week. Cities and states, he said, may end up "turning back the clock" if they relax restrictions too soon, causing more deaths and job losses.
"There is no doubt, even under the best of circumstances, when you pull back on mitigation you will see some cases appear," Fauci told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
More than 83,700 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Nearly 1.4 million people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
Federal officials and health experts believe both numbers undercount the real toll of the virus. That's because not all who are sick get tested, including most who are asymptomatic, and not all deaths from the virus have been accurately counted.
According to new projections this week from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, deaths each day could decline to fewer than 100 by August with increased testing and social distancing efforts. Yet the institute also predicted 60,000 more deaths by then, an increase from its previous projection that accounts for more contact among people in states that are opening up their economies.
The warnings haven't stopped dozens of states from moving forward with openings. The moves come despite the fact that the vast majority of states have not met the White House's guidelines that say there should be a two-week decrease in cases of the coronavirus before relaxing stay-at-home rules.
In Florida, one of the first states to cut back on its restrictions, including opening beaches last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis took a further step Monday by inviting sports teams to visit the state again.
"We want to have the basketball practicing again; we would love to have the Major League Baseball, and I think the message is that our people are starved to have some of this back in their lives. It's an important part of people's lives," the Republican governor said.
In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds, also a Republican, said Monday that the entire state would start getting back to normal by Friday, with restaurants, gyms and salons able to open with lower capacity and increased sanitation requirements. Of the state's 99 counties, 77 have already resumed business.
"With everyone working together, we can and must reopen our economy. We can restart in a stable, safe and responsible way," Reynolds said at a briefing. "And we can slow the spread, protect the health of Iowans and their livelihood, and protect the health care system in the long run."
In New York City, the worst-hit part of the nation, Mayor Bill de Blasio struck an optimistic but cautious tone Monday.
"Let's double down on the things that are working so we can have more of the good days, and start to string them together and move towards the first steps in our restart," de Blasio said.
The Democratic mayor described the daily number of people admitted to hospitals _ 78 _ as "a lot better" than it once was, but said, "We still need to see it go down." The number of patients in ICU units _ 561 _ was still higher than what's needed to safely reopen activities, he said.
De Blasio added that the daily percentage of people who tested positive had dropped, from 14% to 13%.
"That's the good news today," he said.
