Now, the rhetoric around the shutdowns has shifted, and not very subtly — flattening the curve and saving the hospitals are “out,” and not allowing any additional cases to emerge is “in.”

It’s difficult to remember, but flattening the curve was never supposed to be about eradicating the disease. A piece in the progressive Web site Vox featured a widely circulated version of the flattening-the-curve graph and noted that shutdown measures “aren’t so much about preventing illness but rather slowing down the rate at which people get sick.”

A viral Medium piece published in mid-March famously called the period of lockdowns to squelch the disease, the Hammer, and the subsequent period of living with it after the worst had been averted, the Dance. The article didn’t deny the seriousness of the disease; if anything, it was alarmist. Yet by the standards of the current debate, the piece is unacceptably lax.