I was talking to a couple of people and it became clear that people don’t completely grok what flattening the curve means. If you like it in the form of an aphorism, it means (to quote some unnamed wit): “Look you idiot, flattening the curve doesn’t mean you won’t get sick, it means there will be room for you in the ICU when you do”.
If you like to think in pictures, imagine a rectangle, the area of the rectangle is the number of cases. Here is the same rectangle shown two ways. Looking at it vertically is when you don’t flatten the curve, lots of cases in a short amount of time. Oriented horizontally, you get fewer cases in any given time, it just takes longer to have the same number of cases. (Thus buying you space in the ICU and hopefully enough time to develop treatments and vaccines):
Added: when people want to refer to shrinking the number of cases they should say “bending the curve” and not “flattening the curve”!