2020年经济学人 病毒来袭--Covid-19恐成全球性流行病(1)（在线收听）

Leaders

来源于2月29日《社论》版块

The pandemic

流行病

Going global

“全球化”

The virus is coming. Governments have an enormous amount of work to do

病毒来了。政府有大量的工作要做

In public health, honesty is worth a lot more than hope. It has become clear in the past week that the new viral disease, covid-19, which struck China at the start of December will spread around the world. Many governments have been signalling that they will stop the disease. Instead, they need to start preparing people for the onslaught.

在公共卫生领域，坦诚比希望更有价值。在过去的一周里，新的病毒性疾病covid-19在12月初袭击了中国，而且已经很明确这种病毒将在世界范围内传播。许多政府一直发声将阻止这种疾病。相反，他们需要开始让人们准备好应对病毒入侵。

Officials will have to act when they do not have all the facts, because much about the virus is unknown. A broad guess is that 25-70% of the population of any infected country may catch the disease. China’s experience suggests that, of the cases that are detected, roughly 80% will be mild, 15% will need treatment in hospital and 5% will require intensive care. Experts say that the virus may be five to ten times as lethal as seasonal flu, which, with a fatality rate of 0.1%, kills 60,000 Americans in a bad year. Across the world, the death toll could be in the millions.

因为关于这种病毒的很多信息都是未知的，所以官员们将不得不在不明朗的形势下采取行动。在任何一个受感染的国家，都会有25-70%的人口可能感染covid-19，这是一个广泛的猜测。中国的经验表明，在被发现的病例中，大约80%是轻症，15%需要住院治疗，5%需要重症监护。专家称，这种病毒的致死率可能是季节性流感的5到10倍。季节性流感的致死率为0.1%，就能在一个糟糕的年份导致6万美国人死亡。而在世界各地，死亡人数可能达数百万。

If the pandemic is like a very severe flu, models point to global economic growth being two percentage points lower over 12 months, at around 1%; if it is worse still, the world economy could shrink. As that prospect sank in during the week, the S&P 500 fell by 8%.

如果此次流行病和一场非常严重的流感类似，那么根据模型，全球经济增长在12个月内下降两个百分点，大约为1%；如果情况更糟，世界经济可能会萎缩。随着这一预测在本周逐渐明朗，标准普尔500指数下跌了8%。

Yet all those outcomes depend greatly on what governments choose to do, as China shows. Hubei province, the origin of the epidemic, has a population of 59m. It has seen more than 65,000 cases and a fatality rate of 2.9%. By contrast, the rest of China, which contains 1.3bn people, has suffered fewer than 13,000 cases with a fatality rate of just 0.4%. But even before it had spread much outside Hubei, they imposed the largest and most draconian quarantine in history. Factories shut, public transport stopped and people were ordered indoors. This raised awareness and changed behaviour. Without it, China would by now have registered many millions of cases and tens of thousands of deaths.

然而，正如所展示的那样，所有这些结果在很大程度上取决于政府的选择。湖北省是起源地，人口5900万。在湖北已经发现了超过65000个病例，死亡率为2.9%。相比之下，中国其他地区有13亿人口，患病人数不到1.3万，致死率只有0.4%。但在疫情扩散到湖北以外地区之前，就实施了史上规模最大、最严厉的隔离措施。工厂关闭，公共交通停止，人们被要求呆在室内。这提高了人们的意识，改变了人们的行为。如果没有隔离，中国现在恐怕已经出现数百万病例和数万死亡人数。