美国知乎大VRobin Daverman关于美国专家冠状病毒6500万死亡的回答

背景资料：

根据美国媒体Business Insider报导，美国约翰·霍普金斯大学健康安全中心（Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security）的科学家埃里克·托纳（Eric Toner），曾在去年10月针对“冠状病毒感染”进行了全球传染病模拟，制作了科技预测模型。根据他的预测模型，冠状病毒一旦在全球传染开来，后果相当惊人。按照托纳推演的结果，冠状病毒将能够在6个月内传播到几乎全球的每一个国家，并且在1年半的时间内导致6500万人死亡。最近这位专家很火，在不断参加各种电视采访。

Eric Toner from Johns Hopkins simulated 65 million deaths from a virus like coronavirus. How credible is his assessment?

问题：美国约翰·霍普金斯大学健康安全中心（Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security）的科学家埃里克·托纳（Eric Toner）测算出全球6500万人会因为冠状病毒感染死亡。他的推论有多可信？

If you watched his interview, he himself said that this was unlikely, because in this “worst case” scenario, he modeled two contradictory assumptions occurring at the same time. One is that the disease will be quite deadly, and the other is that the disease will spread widely.

如果你看了他的采访，他自己已承认这一结果不太可能，因为为了构成“最恶劣的情况”，他同时采用了两个相互矛盾的假设。一个是该病毒致死率很高，一个是该病毒传播性强。

In real life, deadly diseases like Ebola don’t spread widely, because they kill their hosts too quickly. Diseases such as the seasonal flu spread widely, precisely because they are not very deadly, so you have people having the flu and still go to work and go to school, and spread their germs around. You need people who are not very incapacitated by the virus to spread it around. So the “worst case” model is just that, a big number resulting from two contradictory assumptions happening at the same time.

在真实的世界里，埃博拉这样的致命病毒不会广泛传播，因为它过快杀死了宿主。季节性流感之类的疾病传播迅速，正是由于其不致命性，所以你会看到有些感染了流感的人依然去上班上学，然后传染周边的人。为了让病毒有效的传播，患病者需要保持体力。所以模型中的“最恶劣情况”只是一个自相矛盾的前提同时发生的结合。

The thing is, if you don’t have a big number to shop around, you don’t get on TV. So you come up with a big number, and you get on TV, and then what? He’s not a front line clinician. One of those who write books about Ebola but didn’t go to Sierrra Leone or DRC. Frankly the WHO has unparalleled expertise on this because they have front-line clinicians who’ve been fighting infectious diseases on the ground forever, Ebola, Malaria, Hepatitis, Zika Virus, Avian Flu, SARS, MERS, you name it. They actually have useful information to give. Things you can use to protect yourself with, thus change the trajectory of this infection by your own action.

关键是，如果你没有得出一个惊天动地的数字，你是无法上电视的。所以你得出了一个巨大的数字，你接受了电视采访，然后呢？他不是一个一线医疗人员。就如同那些从未去过西非，但是出版了关于埃博拉著作的“专家”。坦白而言，世界卫生组织对此病拥有无法比拟的专业人士，因为他们的前线医疗人员一直都在战地上和各种传染疾病作斗争：埃博拉、疟疾、乙肝、兹卡病毒、禽流感、SARS、MERS，应有尽有。他们才是有一手资料的人。比方说可提供保护自己的方法，藉此从你开始改变传播途径。

The final tally is not like an earthquake or a hurricane, which is something that just happens, and you can do nothing about it. This infection occurs through human-to-human transmission. Like a car accident. How many accidents depends on how people drive and how the road is designed. How many people get infected will be the same thing. It depends on how people behave. Literally if people just work from home for ten days, and/or wear a mask when you go out shopping or meeting with other people for 10 - 14 days, then the infection won’t spread. It’s that simple!

此外最终的感染人数是可控的，这不是如地震或飓风这样一次造成伤亡的天灾。感染是人传人，类似于车祸。车祸的发生率取决于开车人的表现和道路设计。多少人被感染也是同样的事。取决于人们如何表现。简单而言，如果人们在家工作十天，并且、或者在十到十四天中出门购物或聚会时带口罩，那么病毒就不会传播开来。就是这么简单的道理！