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Reader question: Please explain this sentence, with "flatten the curve" in particular: Now is the time to stay inside as much as possible and do your part to flatten the curve. My comments: Obviously we are talking about the coronavirus and "flatten the curve" is a jargon medical experts keep using these days. By jargon, I mean it's something the technical people understand easily but laymen like you and I cannot grasp without difficulty. First, let me paraphrase: Now is the time to stay at home. That way, your contact with other people is limited, and your chance of getting infected is reduced also. If all people stay inside, the overall number of infections will drop. Yes, flattening the curve means reducing the number of infections. The question is, really, what curve? Curve refers to the imaginary arch in a numbers graph or chart, a diagrammatical illustration of a set of data, depicting, say, the economy growing or decreasing during a certain period of time. Let's use coronavirus infections for example. If the infections grow by 50 per cent this week, from a growth of 10 percent last week, the curve in the graph or chart is curved upward. If next week, the number of infections grows by 70 per cent, the curve arches further up. If two weeks later, the number of infections drops sharply, the curve goes down steeply. To flatten the curve, literally is to reduce and then keep the growth rate to a more or less stable point, so the curve looks like a level line rather than the shape of a rainbow or the country road in the mountains. In other words, the curve is flattened. | 
