- “In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 was beginning to take its awful toll in the United States, three words offered a glimmer of hope: flatten the curve.”
- “What we need to do is flatten that down.” – Anthony Fauci
- “For countries staring down fast-rising coronavirus case counts, the race is on to ‘flatten the curve.’”
- “In some ways, flattening the curve did not work as intended.”
- Fauci described the risk of Covid to the U.S. as ‘minuscule’ in late February 2020, and [estimated] ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’” – Wall Street Journal (August 5, 2021)
- “Flattening the curve became an abstraction with no real meaning.” – Head of the Yale School of Public Health Epidemiology Department
- “By 2021, the phrase ‘flatten the curve’ had largely fallen out of medical messaging.”
The logic of zero-Covid was always only half-coherent. A beginning without an end.
Zeroing out the virus involves an aggressive upfront program to suppress and control the pandemic through intensive mass testing and contact tracing, vast quarantines, travel bans, closing of businesses and suspension of public gatherings, extending to full-city or nationwide lockdowns, all at an escalating social and economic cost. But zero-Covid leads straight into a corner. SARS-CoV-2 was never going to simply disappear. It continues to circulate widely in the 175 countries not following an “elimination” strategy. In fact, the virus is constantly mutating – more than 20 important variants have emerged in the past 3 years – becoming more infectious and more virulent. The risk from both internal and external sources has escalated over time.
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