Economist article on coronavirus I am wondering about an article in the Economist here:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/02/29/covid-19-is-now-in-50-countries-and-things-will-get-worse
There is a graph there


The explanation is as follows
The course of an epidemic is shaped by a variable called the reproductive rate, or R. It represents, in effect, the number of further cases each new case will give rise to. If R is high, the number of newly infected people climbs quickly to a peak before, for want of new people to infect, starting to fall back again (see chart 2). If R is low the curve rises and falls more slowly, never reaching the same heights. With sars-cov-2 now spread around the world, the aim of public-health policy, whether at the city, national or global scale, is to flatten the curve, spreading the infections out over time.

I am having trouble with this. There are 2 curves here. First of all, I am not sure of the different processes that determine them. It says one is without measures. The other is with measures. But it also says one is with high R and the other with low R. Is R a fixed constant for a disease? Alternatively, is there some variability in R and does that degree of variation affect transmission? This is not explained or stated in the article and I haven't heard R described in this way. At best it is not written clearly in my opinion. 

In addition, does without measures necessarily imply high R? Is that what they are getting at? Also, it looks to me as though the blue graph goes to zero very quickly, basically when t is equal to the mean of the orange curve. That means that without measures the epidemic will end quickly (because it exhausts all the possible patients). 

Finally the areas under the two curves is about the same. This means that the number of patients is about the same with or without measures. 

Anyway, can anyone clear up any of this?
R is a reference to R0, otherwise known as the basic reproductive rate, and means the number of new cases from a single patient infection. R0 has to be above 1 for a disease to persist. It is a classic equation which account for the probability of transmission against immunity. The y-axis is the number of infecteds, very poorly presented.

The idea is that R0 will be lower if there is containment (less people to infect because you can't move around), but will last longer, possibly because the number of naive patients (not encountered the virus) will be larger over a longer period of time. 

That particular graph appears to be saying that everyone at risk of infection will get infected with or without control measures (the surface area under the graphs is approximately the same*) and the only thing that will halt the virus is acquired immunity. If this is mainstream economic thinking then I beg to differ, albeit I note the source is CDC (again see note*). 

For example, all other respiratory viral infections are seasonal. If COVID-19  is seasonal containment is the right choice, because the window of transmission is limited.

*, Given this is of CDC origin I think either its a mistake, or at the very least was taken out of context, because the idea is that overall there is a lower number of people infected as a result of "social distancing" and that does not appear to be what the two curves show.