This is what is meant by flattening the curve:

When agents move widely, the disease spreads very fast, and lots of them are infected at the same time. For this simulation, the maximum infection rate for widely mobile agents was 78%. For the exact same disease, with the same transmission rate and recovery rate, restricting agents to narrow mobility not only stretched out the time course of the epidemic, it also substantially reduced the maximum infection rate to only 25.6% — less than a third of what it was under widely mobile agents. -- Paul E. Smaldino, Cognitive and Information Sciences Quantitative and Systems Biology, University of California, Merced