Flattening the Curve
Flattening the Curve
First we are going to start with Exponential growth. If you don't understand then there is a video in the link below. Exponential growth is not a straight line. It exponentially gets bigger and can exceed the care capacity. Exponential growth is a curve and we want to flatten the rate at which it grows to slow the spread and give us more time to treat patients and recover.
Flattening the curve is not easy. With careful precautions and protective measures we can slow the amount of cases of Coronavirus. Lets take Ann Arbor as an example, which has a population of 100,000 people. Suppose there are 5,000 hospital beds across all the hospitals. That means only 5% of Ann Arbor residents can get treated for coronavirus at a given time and the rest will not recover for a long time. That means with protective measures we can flatten the curve and stay within treatment capacity, which will benefit everyone including our doctors and nurses.
Why We Flatten The Curve
Emily B. March 21, 2020 (K7)
Many people have probably heard the term "flattening the curve" before somewhere, but still might not know exactly what it is about. Flattening the curve is a very important thing to do in times like this. It might just be slowing down the coronavirus cases to some people and might not seem as important as it really is, but in reality, it does so much more. As mentioned above, flattening the curve may help slow down the spread rate of this new virus. Slowing down the rate of spread can help prevent our health care workers from contracting this illness, which in turn, will keep our amount of people to take care of patients from going down. Another good effect of flattening the curve is buying time for government and university scientists to produce a treatment and possibly a vaccine for COVID-19, something we currently don't have yet. Albeit all the cancelled activities and school might seem like a really annoying thing, it is most definitely imperative and a great way to flatten the curve.