"What governments are trying to do is slow transmission so that the peak of infection is not so high — that’s what it means to flatten the curve"
As leaders from Donald Trump to Boris Johnson have acknowledged that the coronavirus is firmly established on their shores, governments are changing strategy to fight the deadly outbreak by delaying its transmission. Researchers, meanwhile, are racing to find a cure.
In this new coronavirus world, a universally recognized medical lexicon has spread as quickly as the infection, and once-seldom-used terms like “pandemic,” “quarantine,” and “herd immunity” have suddenly become part of normal conversation — but no term is as important as “flattening the curve.”
“Coronavirus makes 15% to 20% of those infected very sick, and 5% need intensive care,” explains Dr. Terese Katzenstein, head of infectious diseases at University Hospital Copenhagen in Denmark. “If many people get ill at once, there won’t be enough ICU [intensive care unit] capacity. So even though there’s no vaccine and many people will eventually get the virus, what governments are trying to do is slow transmission so that the peak of infection is not so high — that’s what it means to flatten the curve. We want to avoid what’s happened in Italy, where people are dying because there’s not enough medical care.”
With Italy on lockdown and Spain emerging as a new hotspot, the World Health Organization says Europe is now the world’s new virus epicenter, with more cases than the rest of the world combined, apart from China, where the virus broke out.
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