Whatever happened to 'flatten the curve'?

By Washington Examiner

September 1, 2020 - 11:50 AM

This week, tens of millions of school children will be starting a new academic year. However, instead of throwing on their backpacks and heading to receive in-person lessons from their teachers, many of them will be at home staring at computer screens and tablets, if they bother tuning in at all.

In the early stages of the pandemic, school closures were billed as a last resort, a desperate and temporary effort to “slow the spread.” Yet even as distance learning has proven an unmitigated disaster for working parents and for the social and academic development of children, here we are, six months into school closures and with no end in sight.

School closures have been the most dramatic and harmful but by no means the only way federal, state, and local governments have kept in place significant restrictions on human interaction.

Back in March, political leaders justified drastic measures by talking of “flattening the curve.” The idea was that there would be no way to prevent the coronavirus from spreading and from causing death, but the big fear was having so many cases simultaneously that the medical system would become overwhelmed. One popular graph showed a line representing the health system's capacity. Without any protective measures in place, the graph suggested, the curve of cases would be steep, breaking through capacity. A second, flatter curve represented what things were supposed to look like with protective measures. It showed a longer epidemic, but one in which the caseload was spread out, so that even at the peak, the number of cases were within the medical system’s ability to function.-- excerpt, rest at link above --