Thế giới vừa trải qua cột mốc buồn khi trang web worldometers.info - một chuyên trang về tình hình COVID-19 - đưa ra thống kê số liệu rằng đã có hơn 33 triệu ca mắc COVID-19 trên toàn thế giới, trong đó 1 triệu người đã tử vong.
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Coronavirus Deaths Pass One Million Worldwide
Over the past 10 months, the virus has taken more lives than H.I.V., malaria (bệnh sốt rét), influenza (bệnh cúm) and cholera (dịch tả). And as it sows destruction in daily life around the globe, it is still growing quickly.
More than H.I.V. More than dysentery (bệnh lỵ). More than malaria, influenza, cholera and measles (bệnh sởi) — combined.
In the 10 months since a mysterious pneumonia began striking residents of Wuhan, China, Covid-19 has killed more than one million people worldwide as of Monday — an agonizing toll (con số thương tâm) compiled from official counts, yet one that far understates how many have really died. It may already have overtaken tuberculosis (bệnh lao) and hepatitis (viêm gan) as the world’s deadliest infectious disease (bệnh truyền nhiễm), and unlike all the other contenders, it is still growing fast.
Like nothing seen in more than a century, the coronavirus has infiltrated (xâm nhập) every populated patch of the globe, sowing (gieo rắc) terror and poverty, infecting millions of people in some nations and paralyzing (làm tê liệt) entire economies. But as attention focuses on the devastation caused by halting (tạm dừng) a large part of the world’s commercial, educational and social life, it is all too easy to lose sight of the most direct human cost.
More than a million people — parents, children, siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, classmates — all gone, suddenly, prematurely. Those who survive Covid-19 are laid low for weeks or even months before recovering, and many have lingering ill effects whose severity and duration remain unclear.
Yet much of the suffering could have been avoided — one of the most heartbreaking aspects of all.
“This is a very serious global event, and a lot of people were going to get sick and many of them were going to die, but it did not need to be nearly this bad,” said Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which aims to protect people’s health from epidemics and disasters.
Places like China, Germany, South Korea and New Zealand have shown that it is possible to slow the pandemic enough to limit infections (sự lây nhiễm) and deaths while still reopening businesses and schools.
But that requires a combination of elements that may be beyond the reach of poorer countries and that even ones like the United States have not been able to muster: wide-scale testing (xét nghiệm trên diện rộng), contact tracing (truy vết tiếp xúc), quarantining (cách ly), social distancing (giãn cách xã hội), mask wearing, providing protective gear, developing a clear and consistent strategy, and being willing to shut things down in a hurry when trouble arises.
No one or two or three factors are the key. “It’s all an ecosystem. It all works together”, said Martha Nelson, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health (Viện Y tế Quốc gia) who specializes in epidemics (bệnh dịch) and viral genetics (di truyền virus), and who studies Covid-19.
It comes down to resources (nguồn lực), vigilance (sự cảnh giác), political will (ý chí chính trị) and having almost everyone take the threat seriously — conditions harder to attain when the disease is politicized (chính trị hóa), when governments react slowly or inconsistently (không nhất quán), and when each state or region goes its own way, advisable or not.
“It’s one thing to have all the technical capabilities, but if our leaders undermine (phá hoại ngầm) science, minimize (đánh giá thấp) the epidemic or falsely reassure (trấn an) people, we put everything else at risk”, Dr. Inglesby said.
Time and again, experts say, governments reacted too slowly, waiting until their own countries or regions were under siege (bao vây, vây hãm), either dismissing the threat or seeing it as China’s problem, or Asia’s, or Italy’s, or Europe’s, or New York’s.
Thomas R. Frieden, a former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Trung tâm kiểm soát và phòng ngừa dịch bệnh Hoa Kỳ), said that a major failing had been in governments’ communication with the public, nowhere more so than in the United States.
“You have standard principles of risk communication: Be first, be right, be credible, be empathetic,” he said. “If you tried to violate those principles more than the Trump administration has, I don’t think you could.”
The world now knows how to bend the curve of the pandemic — not to eliminate risk (loại bỏ rủi ro), but to keep it to a manageable level (giữ ở mức có thể kiểm soát được) — and there have been surprises along the way.
Masks turned out to be more helpful than Western experts had predicted. Social distancing on an unheard-of scale (quy mô chưa từng thấy) has been more feasible (khả thi) and effective than anticipated (dự kiến). The difference in danger between an outdoor gathering and an indoor one is greater than expected.
And, crucially, people are most contagious (lây nhiễm) when they first show symptoms (triệu chứng) or even earlier, not days or weeks later, when they are sickest — a reversal (sự đảo ngược) of the usual pattern with infectious diseases (bệnh truyền nhiễm). That makes preventive measures (các biện pháp phòng chống) like wearing masks and swift responses like isolating (cách ly) and testing people for possible exposure much more important; if you wait until the problem is evident, you’ve waited too long.
Countries have learned the hard way that their supply chains (chuỗi cung ứng) for testing kits (dụng cụ xét nghiệm), laboratory chemicals and protective equipment (thiết bị bảo hộ) were inadequate, too prone to breakdown, or too dependent on foreign suppliers (nguồn cung cấp nước ngoài).
It remains unclear how the virus mutates (biến đổi), or how fast, which makes it impossible to predict how long a possible vaccine might work. More broadly, the pandemic has exposed how little scientists know about coronaviruses, even those that cause the common cold, and especially those that circulate in bats and other animals.
“It seems to people who are on lockdown (phong tỏa) that it’s going on interminably, but for scientists it’s just the beginning,” Dr. Nelson said. “We are still just scratching the surface (chạm đến bề nổi) of this.”
From a public health standpoint, the biggest unknown may be whether the world will be any better prepared when — not if, but when — the next pandemic arrives.
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