表示流行病的pandemic和epidemic有什么区别?_BEC初级作文

表示流行病的pandemic和epidemic有什么区别?

近日，韩国、日本、意大利等国新冠肺炎确诊病例急剧增加，epidemic和pandemic这两个词频频在外媒报道中出现。那么到底应该用epidemic，还是pandemic呢？

As the new coronavirus continues to spread around the world, the words epidemic and pandemic are showing up in news reports more often than they usually do. While the terms are closely related, they don’t refer to the same thing.

新冠病毒持续在全球传播之际，epidemic和pandemic这两个词比往常更频繁地在资讯报道中出现。尽管这两个词很相近，但二者指的不是同一种东西。

表示流行病的pandemic和epidemic有什么区别?1

As the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) explains on its website, “an epidemic occurs when an infectious disease spreads rapidly to many people.” Usually, what precedes an epidemic is an outbreak, or “a sudden rise in the number of cases of a disease.” An outbreak can affect a single community or several countries, but it’s on a much smaller scale than an epidemic.

感染控制和流行病学专业人员协会在网站上解释道：“当一种传染性疾病迅速传播给许多人时，就被称为epidemic。”通常，epidemic发生之前会有outbreak（疾病暴发），即“某种疾病案例的突然增加”。Outbreak可能影响到单个社区或几个国家，但规模比epidemic小得多。

If an epidemic can’t be contained and keeps expanding its reach, public health officials might start calling it a pandemic, which means it’s affected enough people in different areas of the world to be considered a global outbreak. In short, a pandemic is a worldwide epidemic. It infects more people, causes more deaths, and can also have widespread social and economic repercussions. The spread of the Spanish influenza from 1918 to 1919, which killed between 20 and 40 million people around the world, was a pandemic; more recently, the H1N1 influenza created a pandemic in 2009.