When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?
Covid-19疫情什么时候才能结束?它会怎样结束?
According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.
根据历史学家的说法，大流行通常有两种意义上的结束：一种是医疗意义上的结束，出现在发病率和病亡率大幅下降的时候;另一种是社会意义上的结束，发生在人们对疾病的恐惧逐渐消退的时候。
“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.
“当人们问‘什么时候才能结束’时，”约翰斯·霍普金斯大学(Johns Hopkins)的医学历史学家(Jeremy Greene)说，“他们问的是社会意义上的结束。”
In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease. Allan Brandt, a Harvard historian, said something similar was happening with Covid-19: “As we have seen in the debate about opening the economy, many questions about the so-called end are determined not by medical and public health data but by sociopolitical processes.”
换句话说，大流行的结束并不是因为征服了疾病，而是因为人们厌倦了恐慌模式，学会了与疾病共存。哈佛大学历史学家(Allan Brandt)表示，新冠病毒也出现了类似情况：“正如我们在有关开放经济的辩论中所看到的那样，许多关于所谓结束的问题不是由医疗和公共卫生数据决定的，而是由社会政治进程决定的。”
Endings “are very, very messy,” said Dora Vargha, a historian at the University of Exeter. “Looking back, we have a weak narrative. For whom does the epidemic end, and who gets to say?”
埃克塞特大学(University of Exeter)的历史学家(Dora Vargha)说，疫情的结束往往“非常、非常混乱”。她说：“回顾过去，我们的叙事很不周密。疫情究竟对于谁来说算是结束了，疫情结束又是谁说了算呢?”
In the path of fear
恐惧之路
An epidemic of fear can occur even without an epidemic of illness. Dr. Susan Murray, of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, saw that firsthand in 2014 when she was a fellow at a rural hospital in Ireland.
即使没有疾病的流行，恐惧也会流传开来。都柏林皇家外科学院(Royal College of Surgeons)的(Susan Murray)博士在2014年亲眼目睹了这种事，当时她正在爱尔兰一家乡村医院从事研究工作。
In the preceding months, more than 11,000 people in West Africa had died from Ebola, a terrifying viral disease that was highly infectious and often fatal. The epidemic seemed to be waning, and no cases had occurred in Ireland, but the public fear was palpable.
在之前的几个月里，西非有超过1.1万人死于埃博拉病毒，这是一种可怕的病毒性疾病，传染性极强，往往致命。当时的疫情似乎正在减弱，爱尔兰也没有出现病例，但公众却非常恐惧。
“On the street and on the wards, people are anxious,” Dr. Murray recalled recently in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. “Having the wrong color skin is enough to earn you the side-eye from your fellow passengers on the bus or train. Cough once, and you will find them shuffling away from you.”
“在街头、在病房里，人们都很焦虑，”默里博士最近在《新英格兰医学杂志》(the New England Journal of Medicine)的一篇文章中回忆道。“肤色不对就足以让你在公交车或火车上被其他乘客侧目。咳一声，你就会看见他们慢慢地从你身边走开。”
Dr. Murray wrote: “If we are not prepared to fight fear and ignorance as actively and as thoughtfully as we fight any other virus, it is possible that fear can do terrible harm to vulnerable people, even in places that never see a single case of infection during an outbreak. And a fear epidemic can have far worse consequences when complicated by issues of race, privilege, and language.”
默里博士写道：“如果我们没有准备好像抗击任何其他病毒那样，严肃积极地与恐惧和无知做斗争，恐惧就有可能对弱势群体造成可怕的伤害，即使在疫情暴发期间从未出现一例感染病例的地区也是如此。当种族、特权和语言问题令情况复杂化时，恐惧的流传可能会产生更可怕的后果。
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