I could see that as the explanation if the curve has stopped going up exponentially because we are approaching herd immunity, but that isn’t what’s commonly believed… Instead, we’d expect the number of new deaths each day to have shifted to a different exponential curve as a result of control measures, and only by coincidence would this exponential have a coefficient near zero (hence nearly constant deaths).
[Though as Vaniver points out, it’s a bit more complicated when you account for the serial interval (the time lag for an infected person to infect another).]
Maybe this is not the type of explanation you’re looking for but logistic curves (and other S-curves) look linear for surprisingly long.
I could see that as the explanation if the curve has stopped going up exponentially because we are approaching herd immunity, but that isn’t what’s commonly believed… Instead, we’d expect the number of new deaths each day to have shifted to a different exponential curve as a result of control measures, and only by coincidence would this exponential have a coefficient near zero (hence nearly constant deaths).
[Though as Vaniver points out, it’s a bit more complicated when you account for the serial interval (the time lag for an infected person to infect another).]