国家地理:为了结束这场流行病 我们必须相信科学(12)（在线收听）

Gen C gets through the new pandemic with relatively few deaths or economic disruptions because they learned some crucial lessons when they were children: that public health advice is based on the best available data, that such advice can change as new evidence accumulates, that science is an iterative process that cannot be fast-tracked.

C世代挺过这场新的大流行，死亡人数或经济动荡相对较少，因为他们在孩童时期学到了一些重要教训：公共卫生建议是根据当下能取得的最佳资料，这样的建议会随着新证据的累积而改变，科学是无法速成的反复渐进过程。

Maybe by then there also will be more workers in the professions that got us through the coronavirus catastrophe: more doctors, nurses, paramedics; more specialists in infectious disease, epidemiology, virology, and microbiology, each of them having chosen a career that as kids they had watched in its finest hour. It has happened before. Some of the scientists now engaged in the struggle against the coronavirus, such as Gonsalves and Markel, ended up where they did after working to help untangle AIDS, an earlier viral mystery that killed us in ways never seen before.

或许到了那个时候，现在帮助我们度过冠状病毒浩劫的几种专业人士也会更多：更多的医生、护理师、医务辅助人员，以及更多的传染病学、流行病学、病毒学和微生物学专家，他们每个人选择那个职业，都是因为小时候见证了它最光荣的时刻。这种事不是第一次发生。现在忙于对抗新冠病毒的某些科学家，如贡萨尔维斯和马克尔，都是在昔日致力于解开以前所未见的方式夺走人命的艾滋病毒谜团后，成了该领域的佼佼者。

So the question is whether Gen C will respond with something other than "global amnesia" when the next plague arrives, as it almost surely will. This is what I yearn for, not just for the sake of my own bruised confidence but also for the sake of my two beloved granddaughters, who would have to live the reality I'm most fretting about.

因此，问题是，下一场瘟疫到来时（几乎肯定会发生），C世代能否用不同于“全球失忆”的态度做出反应。我衷心渴望如此，不只为了我自己受挫的信心，也为了我两个心爱的孙女，她们不得不生活在我最担忧的现实中。