The point of “flattening the curve” is to not exhaust care resources before they can be replenished. Before a vaccine is developed, likely as many people will become infected anyway, but if it is slower, fewer will be denied health care, and fewer medical care workers will be infected and die.
I would rather be sick (if I end up that way) in a circumstance where my care givers are not exhausted, I’ll, or flat out of resources.

Less infection.

It is about not overloading the hospitals by having too many sick people at once.
It is also to prevent the situation, where non-covid patients can not get treatment because all available required resources are already being used on covid patients.

Flattening the curve simply means reducing the rate at which people get infected. In the early stages of the disease, the growth is exponential. If you plot the curve, you get something that rises very rapidly, With proper social distancing, the rate of new infections can be lowered. If you look at the curve, it stops rising so rapidly, that is, it starts to flatten. A significant stage that a lot of people talk about is the point at which the number of new cases stops increasing. The hope is that a point has been reached where the number of new cases starts to decline.

A little of both, really. I mean, the concept of “flattening the curve” is to spread out the rate of infection so as not to overwhelm the system, but ultimately we’re likely to end up with fewer infections as a result of people taking extra precautions, too. The actual intent is to slow the spread.

My understanding is that it means that enough people have had it & hopefully grown immune so it slows down the resulting deaths & the inevitable hospital visits. Then it will visit us annually much like the Flu. By then they hope to have a shot to combat it.

A local couple took their 3 kids to Disney World back in Feb/March. Both parents & 1 child tested positive. The dad was in the hospital for 45 days on the brink of death, the mother just felt under the weather for a few days, & the child only had a low grade fever. The other 2 kids tested negative. So, it seems like it’s the luck of the draw as to how severe your symptoms could be.

It is to allow any infections to come on at a slower pace so as not to inundate the medical centers all at once.

@LadyMarissa I hope having it means you are immune in the future, not known yet.

Flattening the curve only means slowing the rate of infection/death. Until there is a vaccine, or curative treatment, the case numbers are inevitable until there is general immunity.

Mitigation is to buy time until treatment facilities can deal with the numbers, and or until a vaccine or curative treatment is found.

Not to be a pessimist, but there has been a problem finding a vaccine that works against the other corona viruses, so I am not so sure about finding one for the virus that causes Covid-19.

There are no vaccines for SARS or MERS, because those outbreaks ended quickly enough, that they stopped developing vaccines for those.

While flattening the curve does “only mean” reducing the rate of infection and therefore the peak number of people infected at once, it also most likely means a large reduction in the overall number of cases, as well as a reduction in the number of severe cases and death, in the long run.

The first part however is the most crucial and the only one that people clearly have some control over.

The biggest effect of ‘flattening the curve’ is to reduce deaths due to overwhelmed health care system. Flattening successfully means keeping new rate of infection within the capacity to treat the worst affected.
If capacity is overwhelmed, extreme cases that could be saved with the routine resources – beds, personnel, ventilators – are dying because they can’t get that. Flattening the curve saves those people.

I thought it was the title of Kim Kardashian’s new fitness dvd…I really did.

@Tropical_Willie I was repeating what 3 different doctors had said on the news. One was Fauci & I don’t remember who the other 2 were except that I know one wasn’t Birx. The truth is that NONE of the doctors know for sure what we have in store for us. Once again we’re the guinea pigs who wll discover our fate at the same time the doctors do!!!

Yah ! Immunity not known.