A president unfit for a pandemic
一位应对大流行病的不适任总统
Much of the suffering and death coming was preventable. The president has
blood on his hands.
许多痛苦和死亡原本是可以避免的。 总统手上沾满鲜血。
原文：The Boston Globe 社论 March 30, 2020
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/30/opinion/president-unfit-pandemic/
译文：察网 http://www.cwzg.cn/politics/202004/56577.html
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” wrote W.B. Yeats in 1919. A
century later, it’s clear: The epicenter cannot hold. Catastrophic decisions
in the White House have doomed the world’s richest country to a season of
untold suffering.
“事物分崩离析；中心无以为继。” 诗人威廉‧巴特勒‧叶慈 (William Butler Yeats)
于1919年如此写道。一个世纪之后，很明显：疫情爆发的中心已无法承受。白宫的灾难性
决定使这个世界上最富有的国家注定要经历一段无法言喻的苦难日子。
The United States, long a beacon of scientific progress and medical
innovation with its world-class research institutions and hospitals, is now
the hub of a global pandemic that has infected at least 745,000 people and
already claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide. Now that the number of
confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States — more than 140,000 — has
surpassed that of any other nation, Americans are consigned for the coming
weeks to watching the illness fell family members and friends, and to fearing
for their own fate as they watch death tolls rise.
有着世界一流的研究机构和医院的美国，长久以来一直是科学进步和医学创新的灯塔，如
今则成为COVID-19全球大流行的枢纽，这个病毒已感染了全球至少74.5万人，并已夺走了
3.5万多条生命（截止到4月3日下午1点，全球感染人数为106.6万，超过5.6万人死亡——
译者注）。如今，在美国已确认的COVID-19病例数量已超过14万（截止到4月3日下午1点
，美国感染人数已超过25.8万——译者注），这已经超过了其他任何国家，因此，美国人
在接下来的几周内将被迫看着这个疾病使家人和朋友病倒，看着死亡人数上升，同时担心
著自己的命运。
While the spread of the novel coronavirus has been aggressive around the
world, much of the profound impact it will have here in the United States was
preventable. As the American public braces itself for the worst of this
crisis, it’s worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not
attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but a colossal failure
of leadership.
尽管新型冠状病毒在世界范围内已广为传播，但它在美国产生的许多深远影响曾是可以避
免的。当美国公众鼓起勇气为这场危机中最坏的情况做准备时，有件事情值得人们记住，
那就是病毒在这里的蔓延并非归因于上帝的举动或外国入侵，而是领导层的巨大失败。
The outbreak that began in China demanded a White House that could act
swiftly and competently to protect public health, informed by science and
guided by compassion and public service. It required an administration that
could quickly deploy reliable tests around the nation to isolate cases and
trace and contain the virus’s spread, as South Korea effectively did, as
well as to manufacture and distribute scarce medical supplies around the
country. It begged for a president of the United States to deliver clear,
consistent, scientifically sound messages on the state of the epidemic and
its solutions, to reassure the public amid their fear, and to provide steady
guidance to cities and states. And it demanded a leader who would put the
country’s well-being first, above near-term stock market returns and his own
reelection prospects, and who would work with other nations to stem the tide
of COVID-19 cases around the world.
在中国爆发的疫情要求白宫应当在科学的指导下，在同情心和公共服务的指引下，迅速而
有能力地采取行动保护公众健康。它要求政府部门能够像在韩国那样有效地在全国范围内
迅速部署可靠的检测，隔离病例，追踪和遏制病毒的传播，并在全国范围内制造和分发稀
缺的医疗用品。它要求美国总统就疾病流行的情况及其解决方案发出清晰、一致、科学的
资讯，以平复公众的恐惧，为各城市和各州提供稳定的指导。它要求一位领导人，要把国
家的福祉放在首位，而且要高于近期的股市回报和他自己的连任前景，与其他国家一起遏
制COVID-19在全球扩散。
What we have instead is a president epically outmatched by a global pandemic.
A president who in late January, when the first confirmed coronavirus case
was announced in the United States, downplayed the risk and insisted all was
under control. A president who, rather than aggressively test all those
exposed to the virus, said he’d prefer not to bring ashore passengers on a
contaminated cruise ship so as to keep national case numbers (artificially)
low. A president who, consistent with his mistrust and undermining of
scientific fact, has misled the public about unproven cures for COVID-19, and
who baited-and-switched last week about whether the country ought to end
social distancing to open up by Easter, and then, on Saturday, about whether
he’d impose a quarantine on New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A
president who has pledged to oversee the doling out of the $500 billion in
corporate bailout money in the latest stimulus package, some of which will go
to the travel industry in which his family is invested. A president who spent
a good chunk of a recent press conference complaining about how hard it is
for a rich man to serve in the White House even as Americans had already
begun to lose their jobs, their health care, and their lives. A president who
has reinforced racial stigma by calling the contagion a “Chinese virus” and
failed to collaborate adequately with other countries to contain their
outbreaks and study the disease. A president who evades responsibility and
refuses to acknowledge, let alone own, the bitter truth of National
Institutes of Health scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony: that the
country’s testing rollout was “a failing.”
相反，我们所拥有的是一位被全球大流行史诗般击败的总统。一位当1月下旬美国宣布首
例确诊的冠状病毒病例时，对风险轻描淡写，并坚称一切尽在掌控的总统。一位宁愿选择
不让被污染的游轮乘客上岸，以（人为地）保持国家确诊病例数量相对少，而不是积极地
检测所有暴露于病毒的人的总统。一位由于不信任和破坏科学事实，错误引导公众对
COVID-19的未经证实的治疗方法，并于国家是否应在复活节之前结束保持社交距离，以及
之后的周六，是否对纽约州，新泽西州和康涅狄格州实施隔离，对公众实施诱饵和转换(
一种在商业中存在的非法欺骗形式——译者注) 的总统。一位承诺监督最新一揽子刺激计
画中5000亿美元的公司救助资金的发放，而将其中部分资金投入到其家族投资的旅游业中
的总统。一位在美国人民已经开始失去工作、健康甚至生命时，竟在最近一场新闻发布会
上花大量时间抱怨作为一名富人在白宫服务有多么艰难的总统。一位通过将传染病称为“
中国病毒”而加剧了种族歧视，但未能与其他国家充分合作以遏制疫情并研究该疾病的总
统。一位回避责任并拒绝承认（更不用说负责）美国国家卫生研究院科学家安东尼‧福西
博士的见证：国家推出的测试是“失败的”这个真相的总统。
Timing is everything in pandemic response: It can make the difference between
a contained local outbreak that endures a few weeks and an uncontrollable
contagion that afflicts millions. The Trump administration has made critical
errors over the past two months, choosing early on to develop its own
diagnostic test, which failed, instead of adopting the World Health
Organization’s test — a move that kneecapped the US coronavirus response
and, by most public health experts’ estimation, will cost thousands if not
hundreds of thousands of American lives. Rather than making the expected
federal effort to mobilize rapidly to distribute needed gowns, masks, and
ventilators to ill-equipped hospitals and to the doctors and nurses around
the country who are left unprotected treating a burgeoning number of
patients, the administration has instead been caught outbidding individual
states (including Massachusetts) trying to purchase medical supplies. It has
dragged its heels on invoking the Defense Production Act to get scarce,
sorely needed ventilators and masks into production so that they can be
distributed to hospitals nationwide as they hit their peaks in the cycle of
the epidemic. It has left governors and mayors in the lurch, begging for
help. The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the
threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19
cases than were necessary. In other words, the president has blood on his
hands.
在大流行应对中，时间就是一切：它可能是控制在持续数周的局部爆发与无法控制的蔓延
数百万人的传染之间的区别。川普政府在过去两个月中犯了严重错误：选择早期开发自己
的诊断测试，但失败了，而没有采用世界卫生组织的测试——此举使美国的新冠病毒反应
受到限制，据大多数公共卫生专家据估计，这将导致数千甚至数十万美国人的付出生命的
代价。相对于人们所预期的迅速动员联邦力量向设备不足的医院以及全国各地的正在没有
保护地治疗数量迅速增长的病患的医生和护士分发防护服、口罩和呼吸机，川普政府则是
被发现试图向各州（包括马萨诸塞州）高价出售医疗用品。川普政府援引《国防生产法》
以使稀缺，急需的呼吸机和口罩投入生产，以便由他们在流行病高峰期将物资分发给全国
的医院。这让州长和市长们陷入只能乞求帮助的困境。川普政府对威胁及其后果的预判上
浪费的几个月使COVID-19病例成倍增加，远超过了必要的数字。换句话说，总统手上沾满
了鲜血。
It’s not too much for Americans to ask of their leaders that they be
competent and informed when responding to a crisis of historic proportions.
Instead, they have a White House marred by corruption and incompetence, whose
mixed messages roil the markets and rock their sense of security. Instead of
compassion and clarity, the president, in his near-daily addresses to the
nation, embodies callousness, self-concern, and a lack of compass. Dangling
unverified cures and possible quarantines in front of the public like reality
TV cliffhangers, he unsettles rather than reassures. The pandemic reveals
that the worst features of this presidency are not merely late-night comedy
fodder; they come at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and our collective
psyche.
对于美国人来说，在应对历史性危机时，质疑他们的领导者是否有能力和有见识并不为过
。相反，他们的白宫却遭到腐败和无能的破坏，其混杂的信息扰乱了市场并动摇了人们的
安全感。总统不但没有同情心和明确性，反而在每天对国家的讲话中都表现出冷漠，自我
中心和缺乏指导性。他像在真人秀电视节目结束时总要留个悬念一样，在公众面前晃荡著
的未经验证的治疗方法和可能的隔离措施。他在制造不安，而不是安抚人心。这场大流行
揭露出，这位总统最糟糕的特点不仅仅是被拿来当午夜笑料，更是要让我们付出生命，生
计和我们的集体精神。
Many pivotal decision points in this crisis are past us, but more are still
to come. For our own sake, every American should be hoping for a miraculous
turnaround — and that the too-little, too-late strategy of the White House
task force will henceforth at least prevent contagion and economic ruin of
the grandest scale. But come November, there must be a reckoning for the
lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the
president’s watch.
在这场危机中，许多关键的决策点已经过去，但还会有更多。看在我们自己的份上，每个
美国人都应该希望一个奇蹟般地转折——白宫特殊工作小组那些太小，太迟的战略至少可
以防止最大规模的传染和经济崩溃。但是到了11月，必须对逝去的生命、以及那些在总统
眼看着发生的、巨大的、本可避免的痛苦进行清算。