What Flattened India's Curve?

Literally the Law of Epidemics...

A recent NY Times news quiz asked readers to guess which curve charted the trajectory of the Covid outbreak in India over the first half of the year.

Many were surprised by the answer, which showed how quickly the outbreak has receded after spiking sharply in the spring. The implied assumption was that nobody has Any Idea Why?

Are you Kidding?

Every Doctor who's taken Epidemiology 101 Knows Exactly Why!!! It's called Farr's Law aka "The Law of Epidemics":

Epidemic events rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern. The time-evolution behavior can be captured by a single mathematical formula that could be approximated by a bell-shaped curve, more precisely a Gompertz Curve.

British Epidemiologist Dr. William Farr, one of the pioneers of modern epidemiology and medical statistics, made this observation in 1840 while charting deaths from smallpox outbreaks. It's a well established phenomenon taught in entry level epidemiology classes.

But then a funny thing happened. In early 2020 China took unprecedented lockdown measures, never before tried or recommended, to squelch the outbreak in Wuhan. When their outbreak followed a similar Gompertz curve they claimed the lockdown was the cause, and the rest of the world went along with it. Since then we've been living through the lie that the only way the outbreaks end is through human intervention.

But it wasn't true in China, it wasn't true in India, it wasn't true in Sweden, and it won't be true in Florida this month when their case rate peaks and begins a rapid decline even as not a single government intervention is taken.

Please remember this during the fall when California government officials start claiming that mask mandates, school closures, and additional business restrictions are the only way to "Flatten the Curve"

Anyway 0 and 2...