When a virus spreads, the number of people who are infected can quickly rise.

This sharp increase can overload the health care system with sick patients who need intensive care.

One solution is to increase the health care system's capacity.

Whether that's by building hospitals training, additional doctors are buying more equipment.

But that takes time, and resource is which countries don't always have during an epidemic.

Another option is to slow the spread of the virus, something experts call flattening the curve.

If you look at the curves of outbreaks, you know they go big peaks and they come down.

What we need to do is flattened that down.

That would have less people infected that would ultimately have less deaths.

This is done by relying on people in the community to use protective measures to help slow the spread of the virus.

What kind of protective measures were talking about the basics washing your hands, sneezing into a tissue where your elbow avoiding large gatherings and staying home if you're sick?

Closing schools and canceling events can also help slow the transmission of the virus in areas where there's community spread.

The goal is not necessarily to reduce the overall number of cases, although that is often a positive side effect but rather just spread the cases out over an extended period of time.

This means the health care system will be able to treat critical patients as they come in and better cope with the strain that outbreaks place on the medical system.

So even if you're not in a high risk group by practicing simple public health measures, you'll be helping save others lives.