时代周刊:新冠疫情结束的条件(2)（在线收听）

"The end of the pandemic occurred because the virus circulated around the globe,

“那场大流行之所以结束是因为病毒已经传遍了全世界，

infecting enough people that the world population no longer had enough susceptible people in order for the strain to become a pandemic once again,"

被感染的人太多，已经没有足够的易感人群供病毒毒株感染继而再次爆发为一场大流行，”

says medical historian J. Alexander Navarro, Markel's colleague and assistant director of the Center for the History of Medicine.

马克尔的同事、医学史中心助理主任、医学历史学家J·亚历山大·纳瓦罗称。

Eventually, with "fewer susceptible people out and about and mingling," Navarro says, there was nowhere for the virus to go—the "herd immunity" talked about today.

最终，随着“四处走动，混杂的易感人群越来越少”，纳瓦罗说，病毒已经无处可去——也即已经形成了今天所说的“群体免疫”局面。

All told, a whopping third of the world's population had caught the virus.

最终，感染这一病毒的人数足足达到了世界总人口的1/3。

Today, about half a percent of the global population is known to have been infected with the novel coronavirus.

这一次，就已知的数据来看，感染新冠病毒的人数才占世界人口比例的0.5%。

The end of the 1918 pandemic wasn't, however, just the result of so many people catching it.

然而，1918年大流行的结束并不仅仅是因为感染人数太多。

Social distancing was also key to reducing its impact.

隔离也对减少病毒的影响发挥了关键的作用。

Public-health advice back then was strikingly similar to that of today—

当时的公共卫生建议与今天的惊人地相似——

urging mask wearing, frequent handwashing, quarantining and isolating of patients, and the closure of schools and public spaces.

敦促戴口罩，频繁洗手，隔离、隔绝病人，学校停课，停止开放公共场所等。

In fact, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007 found that U.S. cities that implemented more than one of these control measures earlier and kept them in place longer had better, less deadly outcomes than cities that implemented fewer later.

事实上，2007年《美国医学会杂志》刊登的一项研究发现，较早推出两种及以上这类控制措施，且持续落实时间更长的城市相比推出地更晚也更少的城市，其疫情结果更好，程度也更轻。

Public-health officials took these measures despite not knowing for sure whether they were dealing with a virus or a bacterial infection;

公共卫生官员采取这些措施时并不确定他们面对的究竟是病毒还是细菌感染；

the research that proved influenza comes from a virus and not a bacterium didn't come out until the 1930s,

证明流感来自病毒而不是细菌的研究一直到20世纪30年代才问世，

and it wasn't until 2005 that articles in Science and Nature capped off the process of mapping the 1918 strain's genome.

直到2005年《科学》和《自然》上的文章才结束了1918年病毒株基因组图的绘制工作。

Today, scientists are still learning how COVID-19 behaves,

截至目前，科学家们仍在研究新冠肺炎的行为，

but they expect the pandemic won't really end until there's both a vaccine and a certain level of exposure in the global population.

但他们预计，在同时满足疫苗和一定程度的感染率这两个条件之前，大流行不会彻底结束。

"We're not certain," Markel says, "but we're pretty darn sure."

“我们也说不准，”马克尔说，“但还是很有把握的。”

In the meantime, people can help the effort to limit the impact of the pandemic.

与此同时，普通民众也可以为限制大流行的影响尽自己的一份力。

A century ago, being proactive about public health saved lives—and it can do so again today.

一个世纪前，积极主动地参与公共卫生事业也能起到拯救生命的作用——这一次也不例外。