用户中心
How bad will it get?
The coronavirus is likely to become a pandemic. That need not be as catastrophic as it sounds
Two things explain why a new infectious disease is so alarming. One is that, at first, it spreads exponentially. As tens of cases become hundreds and hundreds become thousands, the mathematics run away with you, conjuring speculation about a health-care collapse, social and economic upheaval and a deadly pandemic. The other is profound uncertainty. Sparse data and conflicting reports mean that scientists cannot rule out the worst case—and that lets bad information thrive.
So it is with a new coronavirus, known as 2019-ncov, which has struck in China. The number of reported cases grew from 282 on January 20th to almost 7,800 just nine days later. In that time four reported cases outside mainland China have multiplied to 105 in 19 territories. Doubt clouds fundamental properties of the disease, including how it is passed on and what share of infected people die. Amid the uncertainty, a simulation of a coronavirus outbreak by Johns Hopkins University in October, in which 65m people lost their lives, was put about as a prediction. It is not.
Those are the right questions, though: will the new virus become a global disease? And how deadly will it be? A definite answer is weeks or months away, but public-health authorities have to plan today. The best guess is that the disease has taken hold in China and there is a high risk that it spreads around the world—it may even become a recurrent seasonal infection. It may turn out to be no more lethal than seasonal influenza, but that would still count as serious. In the short term that would hit the world economy and, depending on how the outbreak is handled, it could also have political effects in China.
来源于2月1日刊《社论》版块
情况会糟糕到何种境地？
新型冠状病毒很可能成为一种瘟疫。这未必像听起来那样是灾难性的
一种新传染病引起惊恐的原因有两点。第一，呈指数级扩散。随着数十个病例变成数百个，数百个病例变成数千个，再到数不清，这让人联想到医疗体系崩溃、社会和经济动荡以及致命的瘟疫。第二，具有深度不确定性。寥寥无几的数据和相互矛盾的报告意味着科学家不能排除最坏的情况——这让负面信息泛滥。
一种名为2019-ncov的新型冠状病毒在中国的爆发也具有以上特征。报告的病例数从1月20日的282例增加到9天后的近7800例。在此期间，中国大陆以外报告的4例病例在19个地区增加到105例。不确定性更是给这种疾病的基本特性蒙上了一层阴影，包括传播途径，以及感染人群的致死率。在这种不确定性中，约翰霍普金斯大学去年10月模拟的一次冠状病毒爆发(在模拟中爆发导致6500万人丧生)被用作一种预测。但情况又远没有预测可怕。
不过，这些都是亟待解决的问题：这种新病毒会成为一种全球性疾病吗？它会有多致命？得到明确的答案是几周或几个月后，但公共卫生当局必须今天就做出计划。最可能的猜测是，这种疾病已经在中国扎根，而且在世界范围内传播的风险很高——它甚至可能成为一种周期性的季节性感染。它可能不会比季节性流感更致命，但仍算严重。在短期内，这将打击世界经济，而且疫情如何处理也可能在中国产生政治影响。
