Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm warned that the states starting to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic “will pay a big price later on.”

Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday that states like Georgia, Colorado and others that are easing social distancing restrictions were “putting gasoline on fire.”

“I think right now, this is one of the things we’ve learned, if we’re going to learn to live with this, then you just don’t walk in the face of it and spit in its eye, because it will hit you,” said Osterholm.

“And I think that that’s a really important issue right now,” he continued. “When we have transmission increasing, when our hospitals are not able to take care of it and we don’t have enough testing to even know what’s going on, then that’s not the time to loosen up.”

Osterholm suggested it was “the worst example of how to start this discussion” about the “loosening” of society.

“I wouldn’t do it,” he added. “I fear that these states will have to pay a big price later on because of what they’re doing.”

Check out the interview here:

“We have to have, as a population, the same discussions about not just how we’re going to die with this virus, but how we’re going to live with it for the next 16 or 18 months,” infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm tells @jaketapper. “This is not a battle, this is a war.” pic.twitter.com/Dd5agDCkPp

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) April 23, 2020