A pedestrian wearing a face mask walks past a closed shop in San Mateo City, California, the United States, April 2, 2020.(Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling)

According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)'s semiannual Global Economics Prospects outlook released last week, the U.S. output is expected to shrink by 8.0 percent in 2020, and the unemployment rate will probably peak around 20 percent in the early summer.

Karen Dynan, a nonresident senior fellow at PIIE and economics professor at Harvard University, predicted a roughly 6 percent unemployment rate by the end of next year, compared with 3.5 percent prior to the COVID-19 crisis.

To cushion the economic impact of the epidemic, the U.S. Congress last month approved a 2.2-trillion-dollar relief package, which includes measures to stabilize the labor market, such as emergency loans for small businesses, business tax breaks, unemployment benefits expansion, and 1,000-dollar-plus direct payments for working Americans.

Earlier this week, major U.S. airlines and the Treasury Department reached a tentative agreement over financial assistance for the industry heavily hit by the pandemic through a payroll support program, as part of the relief package.

"Everything I'm seeing suggests the economy will go from red to green through yellow," Bernstein said. "And we'll likely be hanging out at 'yellow' for at least a year as we create a heretofore unseen rolling average of commerce and distancing/testing/tracing/re-quarantining."

Dynan said the most likely scenario would be a check-mark shaped cycle, which means a sharp downturn followed by a relatively slow recovery.