You can't see the effects of an intervention stopping new coronavirus infections until you wait past the end of the incubation period of the virus. And if you'

You can't see the effects of an intervention stopping new coronavirus infections until you wait past the end of the incubation period of the virus. And if you're not testing very aggressively it'll take another week beyond that for mild illnesses to turn into the sort of thing that gets people to the hospital. Also, technically, if you go from an exponentially increasing problem to getting the same number of infections every day you've "flattened the growth" even though you haven't flattened the number cases.