The “flattening the curve” idea suggests that if we wash our hands and stay at home while being sick aggressively enough, we won’t have to stop the virus from becoming endemic and infecting 40% to 70% of all people, but we can slow the spread of the infection so much that out medical system can deal with the case load. This is how our normally distributed curve looks like when it contains 10.8 million patients, of which no more than 170,000 are ill at the same time…

Dampening the infection rate of COVID-19 to a level that is compatible with our medical system means that we would have to spread the epidemic over more than a decade! (Far to the left, you see our unmitigated distribution for comparison.) I am pretty confident that we will have found effective treatments until then, but you get the idea: reducing the infectivity of the new corona virus to a manageable level is simply not going to be possible by mitigation, it will require containment.