國家地理:為了結束這場流行病 我們必須相信科學(12)

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世代挺過這場新的大流行，死亡人數或經濟動蕩相對較少，因為他們在孩童時期學到了一些重要教訓：公共衛(wèi)生建議是根據當下能取得的最佳資料，這樣的建議會隨著新證據的累積而改變，科學是無法速成的反復漸進過程。

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.

或許到了那個時候，現在幫助我們度過冠狀病毒浩劫的幾種專業(yè)人士也會更多：更多的醫(yī)生、護理師、醫(yī)務輔助人員，以及更多的傳染病學、流行病學、病毒學和微生物學專家，他們每個人選擇那個職業(yè)，都是因為小時候見證了它最光榮的時刻。這種事不是第一次發(fā)生。現在忙于對抗新冠病毒的某些科學家，如貢薩爾維斯和馬克爾，都是在昔日致力于解開以前所未見的方式奪走人命的艾滋病毒謎團后，成了該領域的佼佼者。

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，問題是，下一場瘟疫到來時（幾乎肯定會發(fā)生），C世代能否用不同于“全球失憶”的態(tài)度做出反應。我衷心渴望如此，不只為了我自己受挫的信心，也為了我兩個心愛的孫女，她們不得不生活在我最擔憂的現實中。