The Virus

The Virus

Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19. 尽管我仍然希望事情会有所不同，但与我交谈过的专家认为，我们很可能面临一场全球悲剧–数十万人死于新冠肺炎。

I hope that society views this as a warning for the future. Covid-19 is bad, but only a warm-up. I think it’s unlikely that this is the worst new pandemic (human-created or otherwise) we’ll see in our lifetimes. We need to be ready to deal with it much better next time. 我希望社会将此视为对未来的警告。 COVID-19是糟糕的，但只是热身。 我认为这不太可能是我们有生之年看到的最严重的新流行病（人为或其他）。 我们需要做好准备，下次处理得更好。

In the meantime, young healthy people should try to avoid getting Covid-19 for as long as possible. It’s true that it doesn’t seem to be very bad for young people, but more people getting it—particularly people who don’t get sick enough to stay home—will accelerate the spread, and this virus seems quite bad for old people and people with pre-existing conditions. 与此同时，健康的年轻人应该尽可能长时间地避免感染新冠肺炎。 的确，它对年轻人似乎不是很糟糕，但更多的人感染它-特别是那些没有生病到足以呆在家里的人-会加速传播，这种病毒对老年人和已有疾病的人似乎相当糟糕。

I expect society will shift to a new normal pretty fast. Some of these elements—e.g., much less business travel, much less handshaking, much more handwashing—I expect to just stick. Some others—e.g., people working from home all of the time—I expect to not stick. 我预计社会将很快转向一个新的常态。 这些元素中的一些-例如，更少的商务旅行，更少的握手，更多的握手-我希望只是坚持。 一些其他的-例如，人们总是在家里工作–我希望不会坚持下去。

The economic disruption is still probably under-appreciated and will remind us that our systems are more fragile than we think. For example, I do not think the recent plunge in US Treasury yields is explained by Covid-19 alone, but rather a reminder of cascading effects that can happen in a complex system. 经济混乱可能仍被低估，并提醒我们，我们的系统比我们想象的更脆弱。 例如，我不认为最近美国国债收益率的暴跌仅仅是由新型冠状病毒肺炎（COVID-19，即2019冠状病毒病）引起的，而是提醒人们，在一个复杂的体系中可能发生连锁反应。