Two of President Trump’s closest advisers on Tuesday predicted the economy will roar back to life later this year, even as China’s sluggish recovery from the coronavirus shows such optimism might be misplaced. With China’s months-long outbreak apparently contained, most factories and businesses there have reopened. But fears of a fresh wave of infections led the government last week to reimpose travel restrictions in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, and order the closure of several hundred movie theaters that had just reopened for the first time since January.

The halting Chinese recovery offers sobering lessons for U.S. policymakers about what is shaping up to be a more protracted economic convalescence than the White House wants, according to business executives and economists. “A V-shaped recovery seems to be really difficult to envision,” said James Green, senior adviser at McLarty Associates and a former U.S. diplomat in Beijing. “The lesson of the Chinese experience is: It’s going to be slow going.”

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In late January, as the coronavirus began galloping across China, the government in Beijing imposed an unprecedented lockdown on the 60 million people in central Hubei province. The quarantine, later broadened to other areas, eventually succeeded in curtailing the spread of the illness. But it sent China’s economy, the world’s second largest, into a tailspin, with investment declining in the first two months by nearly one-quarter.

The United States waited to act, as the president played down the seriousness of the virus and insisted his administration had it under control. Only in March did many governors impose stay-at-home orders on almost all Americans.