The slogan "flatten the curve" represented a massive conceptual mistake. https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21241058/coronavirus-mitigation-suppression-flatten-the-curve

People (probably including me) shared images like this. The idea was that by reducing the peak of outbreaks you can prevent overwhelming hospitals. That's a good idea as far as it goes but images like this were hugely misleading about the options a society faces.

These charts suggested that the "flattened" curve would last longer—that after a few months the flattened curve would have more daily infections than the unflattened curve would have. They implicitly assume that everyone is going to get infected, it's just a question of when.

In reality, there are techniques—wear masks, test, trace, and isolate—that allow societies to keep an infectious disease contained. I didn't know that in March but other countries are proving it's possible. https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries 

The failure to explain this has produced a lot of problems. It meant there wasn't enough attention paid to building testing, tracing, and isolation infrastructure in March and April.

It has also meant strong pressure to relax restrictions, since people think the goal is merely to keep the hospital system from getting overwhelmed—not to eradicate the virus.

A lot of people don't even see this as a choice, because they don't realize there's an alternative to everyone getting sick.