新冠病毒相关科普英语短文

本⽂文来⾃自美国传染病研究专家Dr. Bill Schaffner的访谈。

What is coronavirus?

This is a very large outbreak.

This is Dr. Bill Schaffner, I’m an infectious disease specialist and public health person.

Coronaviruses are a whole family of viruses. For the most part, they don’t cause any real clinical illness except the occasional cold. But you know, from time to time, there’s a rogue coronavirus that develops. We remember SARS 2002, 2003. And then there was another, the MERS virus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus. This new virus, like those other rogue viruses, probably was first transmitted to humans from animals.

What are the symptoms?

So the symptoms resemble influenza. It’s a respiratory virus initially. And so you have fever, not feeling very well, cough and just feeling poorly.

Is there a cure?

We don’t have a direct anti-coronavirus treatment. We can manage the patients through symptomatic care and supportive care, of course. And many patients already, the Chinese have said, have survived this infection.

How to stop the spread?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have this top of the mind. They have deployed over a hundred people to New York, to San Francisco and Los Angeles. They will be screening people who are arriving from particularly Wuhan, China to see whether they are sick.

So there are laboratories around the world, including our own national institutes of health, that are now, already working on developing a rapid diagnostic test and the other thing they’re doing is starting to work on a vaccine.

The global community is really watching this with great care. And we in the United States definitely are on the alert and ready to respond.