> The death rates are also following a similar bell curve across the world, seemingly independent of any lockdown policy. I don't know what you mean, except th

> The death rates are also following a similar bell curve across the world, seemingly independent of any lockdown policy. I don't know what you mean, except that they go up exponentially and then they go down exponentially and so that's a "bell" curve[1]. The important metric isn't the shape of the thing, it's the size. And the sizes of these curves very widely between nations, tracking lockdown agility and adherence surprisingly well. [1] That observation is, frankly, pretty trivial. Outbreaks grow with some probability from every individual case, so the derivative is proportional to the value of the function, always. They must have an exponential shape on both sides. That's just math.