國家地理:為什么病毒讓我們措手不及(2)

When the U.S. death toll 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 ravages 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于美國造成的死亡人數(shù)尚未達到1000人、我們紐約居民因為州長的居家令而待在家第三天時，我打電話給莫爾斯問候他的情況。他現(xiàn)在于哥倫比亞大學梅爾曼公衛(wèi)學院教授流行病學。他現(xiàn)在的年齡段是最容易受到冠狀病毒攻擊的。（我也是）。他和妻子在曼哈頓的公寓進行居家隔離，離我的公寓只有幾公里遠。

"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 prematurely right."

“是的，看到在這么多研究和警告后，我們還是沒有準備好，而且還是不肯接受現(xiàn)實，這令人很沮喪?！彼又昧斯芾韺W大師彼得·德魯克的名言中他最喜歡的一句。德魯克曾被問到：“你犯過最糟的錯誤是什么？”根據(jù)莫爾斯所述，德魯克的回答是：“太早料中未來?！?/p>

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 influenza. "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 vaccine for that.

不論是否太早，莫爾斯和我都沒料中未來。沒有人料到。曾有人在我的新書活動上問我下一次的大流行病會是什么，我說我認識的多數(shù)專家都認為會是流感。莫爾斯在我們通話時告訴我：“我從不喜歡列清單?！彼f他一直認為下一次瘟疫可能來自世界任何地方。但在20世紀90年代初期，他和同事主要關(guān)注流感，因此我也是?；蛟S那是個錯誤；如果下一次的大流行病是流感，這對大多數(shù)人并不是特別嚇人的消息。流感？大家每年都在得。我們有疫苗可以預(yù)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 Geographic in 2007.) All of us described the same dire scenarios, the same war games, the same cries of being woefully unprepared. Why wasn't any of that enough?

因此，或許這些警告太容易被斥為“僅僅是流感”，或者是一位過度緊張的作家的災(zāi)難性想法。但是其他記者也在寫類似主題的著作，有些還是超級暢銷書，例如理查德·普雷斯頓的《伊波拉浩劫》，以及勞里·加勒特晚我一年出版的《逼近的瘟疫》。（其他近期的書則有戴維·夸曼的《下一場人類大瘟疫》，是他2007年的《國家地理》雜志人畜共通傳染病報道的后續(xù)作品。）我們都描述了同樣嚴峻的可能情境、同樣的疫情預(yù)演，也同樣對于我們的毫無準備提出大聲警告。為什么這一切還不足以令人警惕？