Ah, you’re right.. the dots! I still don’t understand why the smoothing makes covid symmetric when the underlying data is asymmetric. A too-large smoothing window, I guess. They must have been trying to smooth out the seasonal job unemployment rates for the labor-heavy jobs.
If you drop the peakiest peak, the data is quite symmetric. Zoom in on 2015-2026 on bls chart. It's pretty symmetric.