Beating coronavirus: Flatten the curve, raise the line!

COVID-19, caused by a coronavirus, has led to a pandemic that threatens everyone.

The overriding strategy to limit the damage and to beat this pandemic is to “flatten the curve and raise the line.”

During a pandemic, health care resources like hospitals and ICU beds can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of patients - above and beyond the baseline number of patients who are already being cared for by the healthcare system, like those with heart attacks, strokes, or other infections.

To visualize the progress of a disease outbreak over time, we can plot an epidemic curve.

This is a graphic depiction of the number of new outbreak cases by date of onset of the disease.

The overall shape of the curve can reveal the type of outbreak we’re dealing with and the horizontal line represents the capacity of the community health care system.

Hospital capacity is defined as the number of beds, staffing, and other measures available for patient care.

Now, most hospitals in the US and many other countries are already operating close to the capacity line, so when a pandemic occurs, the infectious agent spreads very rapidly, and the curve can rise and cross the line.

When this happens, the healthcare system can no longer meet the needs COVID 19 patients as well as all of the other types of patients!

At that point, people are not getting the best care and outcomes like the mortality rate start to rise quickly.

For these reasons, a large number of lives can be saved by simply ensuring people get sick at a slower rate, and this is called “flattening” of the epidemic curve.

A flatter curve assumes the same number of people ultimately get infected, but over a longer period of time, which leads to a less overwhelmed health care system.

Now, a key factor to flatten the curve is social distancing, which refers to measures aimed at reducing close contact between people.

This is why governments are closing schools, non-critical businesses, and other places where people gather like sporting and social events.

By limiting interactions between individuals, we can limit the spread of the disease.