国家地理 为什么病毒让我们措手不及(2)

When the U.S. death toll¹ from COVID-19 had not quite reached a thousand and New Yorkers like me were three days into our governor's stay-at-home order, I phoned Morse to see how he was holding up. He teaches epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and is now in the age range of those most vulnerable to the worst ravages² of the coronavirus. (I am too.) He and his wife were self-quarantining in their Manhattan apartment, just a few miles from mine.

在COVID-19于美国造成的死亡人数尚未达到1000人、我们纽约居民因为州长的居家令而待在家第三天时，我打电话给莫尔斯问候他的情况。他现在于哥伦比亚大学梅尔曼公卫学院教授流行病学。他现在的年龄段是最容易受到冠状病毒攻击的。（我也是）。他和妻子在曼哈顿的公寓进行居家隔离，离我的公寓只有几公里远。

"I'm discouraged, yes, to find we're not better prepared after all this, and we're still deep in denial," Morse said. He went straight to a favorite quote, from management guru Peter Drucker, who once was asked, "What is the worst mistake you could make?" His answer, according to Morse: "To be prematurely³ right."

“是的，看到在这么多研究和警告后，我们还是没有准备好，而且还是不肯接受现实，这令人很沮丧。”他接着引用了管理学大师彼得·德鲁克的名言中他最喜欢的一句。德鲁克曾被问到：“你犯过最糟的错误是什么？”根据莫尔斯所述，德鲁克的回答是：“太早料中未来。”

Morse and I weren't right, prematurely or otherwise. Nobody was. When I was asked on my book tour what the next pandemic would be, I said most of my expert sources believed it would be influenza⁴. "I never liked lists," Morse told me during our call; he said he always knew the next plague could come from anywhere. But in the early 1990s he and his colleagues tended to focus on influenza, so I did too. Maybe that was a mistake; if the next pandemic was going to be influenza, that didn't strike most as especially shattering. The flu? People get that every year. We have a vaccine⁵ for that.

不论是否太早，莫尔斯和我都没料中未来。没有人料到。曾有人在我的新书活动上问我下一次的大流行病会是什么，我说我认识的多数专家都认为会是流感。莫尔斯在我们通话时告诉我：“我从不喜欢列清单。”他说他一直认为下一次瘟疫可能来自世界任何地方。但在20世纪90年代初期，他和同事主要关注流感，因此我也是。或许那是个错误；如果下一次的大流行病是流感，这对大多数人并不是特别吓人的消息。流感？大家每年都在得。我们有疫苗可以预防。

So maybe the warnings were too easy to dismiss as "just the flu" or as the catastrophic thinking of one overwrought writer. But other journalists were writing similar books, and some of them were huge best sellers, like The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, and The Coming Plague, by Laurie Garrett, which came out the year after mine. (Other more recent books include Spillover, David Quammen's follow-up to a story on zoonotic diseases that he wrote for National Geographic⁶ in 2007.) All of us described the same dire⁷ scenarios⁸, the same war games, the same cries of being woefully unprepared. Why wasn't any of that enough?

因此，或许这些警告太容易被斥为“仅仅是流感”，或者是一位过度紧张的作家的灾难性想法。但是其他记者也在写类似主题的著作，有些还是超级畅销书，例如理查德·普雷斯顿的《伊波拉浩劫》，以及劳里·加勒特晚我一年出版的《逼近的瘟疫》。（其他近期的书则有戴维·夸曼的《下一场人类大瘟疫》，是他2007年的《国家地理》杂志人畜共通传染病报道的后续作品。）我们都描述了同样严峻的可能情境、同样的疫情预演，也同样对于我们的毫无准备提出大声警告。为什么这一切还不足以令人警惕？

1 toll   

n.过路(桥)费；损失，伤亡人数；v.敲(钟)

参考例句：

• The hailstone took a heavy toll of the crops in our village last night.昨晚那场冰雹损坏了我们村的庄稼。
• The war took a heavy toll of human life.这次战争夺去了许多人的生命。

2 ravages   

劫掠后的残迹，破坏的结果，毁坏后的残迹

参考例句：

• the ravages of war 战争造成的灾难
• It is hard for anyone to escape from the ravages of time. 任何人都很难逃避时间的摧残。

3 prematurely   

adv.过早地，贸然地

参考例句：

• She was born prematurely with poorly developed lungs. 她早产，肺部未发育健全。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• His hair was prematurely white, but his busy eyebrows were still jet-black. 他的头发已经白了，不过两道浓眉还是乌黑乌黑的。 来自辞典例句

4 influenza   

n.流行性感冒，流感

参考例句：

• They took steps to prevent the spread of influenza.他们采取措施
• Influenza is an infectious disease.流感是一种传染病。

5 vaccine   

n.牛痘苗，疫苗；adj.牛痘的，疫苗的

参考例句：

• The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives.脊髓灰质炎疫苗挽救了数以百万计的生命。
• She takes a vaccine against influenza every fall.她每年秋季接种流感疫苗。

6 geographic   

adj.地理学的，地理的

参考例句：

• The city's success owes much to its geographic position. 这座城市的成功很大程度上归功于它的地理位置。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Environmental problems pay no heed to these geographic lines. 环境问题并不理会这些地理界限。 来自英汉非文学 - 环境法 - 环境法

7 dire   

adj.可怕的，悲惨的，阴惨的，极端的

参考例句：

• There were dire warnings about the dangers of watching too much TV.曾经有人就看电视太多的危害性提出严重警告。
• We were indeed in dire straits.But we pulled through.那时我们的困难真是大极了，但是我们渡过了困难。

8 scenarios   

n.[意]情节；剧本；事态；脚本

参考例句：

• Further, graphite cores may be safer than non-graphite cores under some accident scenarios. 再者，根据一些事故解说，石墨堆芯可比非石墨堆芯更安全一些。 来自英汉非文学 - 环境法 - 环境法
• Again, scenarios should make it clear which modes are acceptable to users in various contexts. 同样，我们可以运用场景剧本来搞清楚在不同情境下哪些模式可被用户接受。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓