The White House is seen through pictures of people that died due to Covid-19 at a National Covid-19 Remembrance event in Washington, DC, on October 4. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

The US started 2020 by “flattening the curve” — and never came up with a plan for what comes next.

In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 was beginning to take its awful toll in the United States, three words offered a glimmer of hope: flatten the curve.

That phrase and charts illustrating the concept were everywhere in mid-March, shortly before the New York City outbreak exploded. The city would see 10,000 cases and nearly 1,000 deaths every day by early April.

Covid-19 cases were spiking, and hospital systems risked being overwhelmed by patients with life-threatening symptoms. If hospitals ran out of beds or ICU units, nurses or doctors, people