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.
每天看著疫情蔓延的消息，十分揪心，真心希望這次疫情可以早日扭轉，恢復正常的工作、生活和學習！最後附上一些術語，供小夥伴學習。
新型冠狀病毒 novel coronavirus
2019新型冠狀病毒：「2019-nCoV」
呼吸道疾病 respiratory diseases
報銷政策 reimbursement policy
潛伏期 incubation period
密切接觸者 close contact
醫學觀察 medical watch/medical observation
疑似病例 suspected case
確診病例 confirmed case
不明原因肺炎 unidentified pneumonia
易感人群 susceptible population
人傳人 human-to-human transmission
非典 severe acute respiratory syndrome，SARS
肺炎 Pneumonia
乾咳 dry cough
隔離 under quarantine
呼吸急促 shortness of Breath
呼吸困難 respiratory Distress
病毒變異 virus mutation
病毒株 virus strain
野味 bush meat
封城 lockdown
口罩 face mask （N95型口罩：N95 face-mask）
醫用外科口罩 Surgical mask
超級傳播者 super-spreader
延伸閱讀
權威雙語：預防 2019 年新型冠狀病毒 (2019-nCoV) 傳播給家庭和社區中其他人的暫行指南
肺炎疫情來襲，學習一下雙語表達和相關知識