As Numbers Sink In, New Reality Confronts A More Somber Trump

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WASHINGTON — Five weeks ago, when there were 60 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States, President Trump expressed little alarm. "This is a flu," he said. "This is like a flu." He was still likening it to an ordinary flu as late as Friday.

华盛顿——五周前，当美国出现60例确诊的冠状病毒病例时，特朗普总统表示丝毫没有惊慌。“这是流感，”他说。“这就像流感一样。直到星期五，他还把其比作普通的流感。

By Tuesday, however, with more than 187,000 recorded cases in the United States and more Americans having been killed by the virus than by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the president's assessment had rather drastically changed. "It's not the flu," he said.

然而，截至周二，美国有超过18.7万的病例记录，死于该病毒的美国人比死于2001年9月11日袭击的美国人还多，总统的评估结果发生了相当大的变化。他说：“不是流感。”

 

The grim-faced president who appeared in the White House briefing room for more than two hours on Tuesday evening beside charts showing death projections ofhellacious proportions was coming to grips with a reality he had long refused to accept. At a minimum, the charts predicted that 100,000 to 240,000 Americans would die.

周二晚间，表情严肃的奥巴马在白宫新闻发布厅(White House briefing room)出现了两个多小时，旁边的图表显示，死亡预测的比例之高令人震惊。他正在面对一个长期以来拒绝接受的现实。这些图表至少预测了10万到24万美国人将会死亡。

 

 

hellacious  /heˈleɪʃəs/

adj. 可怕的；不能容忍的；极其困难的（等于hellaceous）

eg. More such lenient interpretations will ease a hellacious process for employers and workers.如果做出更多类似的解释，这项无比艰巨的工作对用人单位和工薪族来说就能变得容易一些。

 

A crisis that Mr. Trump had repeatedly asserted was "under control" and hoped would "miraculously" disappear has come to consume his presidency, presenting him with a challenge that he seems only now to be seeing more clearly.

特朗普曾多次声称，一场危机“在控制之中”，并希望“奇迹般地”消失，这已经消磨了他的总统职位，这给他带来了一个挑战，他似乎直到现在才更清楚地看到这个挑战。

 

The staggering numbers publicly outlined on Tuesday had forced him over the weekend to reverse his plan to reopen the country by Easter, but they were hardly new or surprising. Experts have been warning of such a possibility for weeks. But more than ever before, Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge them.

周二公布的惊人数字迫使他在上周末改变了在复活节前重新开放该国的计划，但是这些数字并不新鲜也不令人意外。数周以来，专家一直在警告这种可能性。但特朗普似乎比以往任何时候都更多地承认了这一点。

 

"I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead, we're going to go through a very tough two weeks."

总统说：“我希望每个美国人都为即将到来的艰难日子做好准备，我们将经历非常艰难的两个星期。”

Afterward, he added: "We're going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel. But this is going to be a very painful — very, very painful — two weeks."

之后，他补充道:“我们将开始看到一些真正的曙光。但这将是非常痛苦的——非常、非常痛苦的——两个星期。”

 

Under the best-case scenario presented on Tuesday, Mr. Trump will see more Americans die from the coronavirus in the weeks and months to come than Presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon saw die in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined.

在周二提出的最佳情况下，特朗普将会看到更多的美国人死于冠状病毒在未来几周和几个月比总统哈利·s·杜鲁门、艾森豪威尔、肯尼迪、约翰逊和尼克松看到死在朝鲜战争和越南战争的总和。

 

 

scenario 英 /səˈnɑːriəʊ/ 美 /səˈnærioʊ/ 

n. 方案；情节；剧本；设想

a nightmare scenario 最坏的可能

eg.  The conflict degenerating into civil war is everybody's nightmarescenario. 
 这场冲突恶化成内战成为每个人的恶梦。

 

That is a daunting realization for any president, one that left Mr. Trump now anticipating "the worst thing that the country has probably ever seen."

对于任何一位总统来说，这都是一个令人生畏的现实，让特朗普现在面临着“这个国家可能见过的最糟糕的事情”。

 

Mr. Trump said he played down the seriousness of the threat because he chose to be reassuring. "I want to give people hope," he said. "You know, I'm a cheerleader for the country."

特朗普表示，他之所以淡化威胁的严重性，是因为他选择让人安心。“我想给人们希望，”他说。“你知道，我是国家的啦啦队长。”

 

He said longtime business associates were advising him not to react aggressively to the virus, presumably out of concern for what it could mean for the economy, which now faces certain recession.

他说，长期的商业伙伴建议他不要对这种病毒做出过激反应，可能是出于对它可能对经济造成的影响的担心，目前美国经济面临一定的衰退。

 

"I've had many friends, business people, people with great actually common sense — they said, "Why don't we ride it out?'" Mr. Trump said without identifying them. "A lot of people have said, a lot of people have thought about it, ride it out, don't do anything, just ride it out and think of it as the flu. But it's not the flu. It's vicious."

他说:“我有很多朋友，有商人，也有很有常识的人。他们说，‘我们为什么不能挺过去呢?’”特朗普没有透露他们的身份。“很多人都说过，很多人都想过，挺过去，什么都不做，只是挺过去，把它当成流感。但不是流感。这是邪恶的。”

The president did not explain on Tuesday why testing was so slow, nor did he explain why he waited to recommend canceling large events, closing businesses and schools and limiting group gatherings until after governors began ordering it themselves. Nor did he explain why he publicly declared that the country could reopen as early as Easter, only to reverse himself days later, if he understood all along how bad the situation could get.

总统没有解释周二的测试为什么这么慢，也没有解释为什么他一直等到州长们自己下令后才建议取消大型活动、关闭企业和学校、限制团体聚会。他也没有解释为什么他公开宣布国家可以在复活节前重新开放，但几天后他就改变了主意，如果他一直都明白情况会变得多么糟糕。

 

 

publicly 英 /ˈpʌblɪkli/ 美 /ˈpʌblɪkli/ 

adv. 公然地；以公众名义

eg.He later apologized publicly for his remarks. 

后来他为他的说法公开道歉。

 

At the White House briefing on Tuesday, Dr. Fauci was asked whether the death toll could have been kept below the minimum 100,000 now forecast if social distancing guidelines had been put in place earlier. He said it depended on whether the virus had already arrived in the United States and spread further than was known early on.

在周二的白宫新闻发布会上，有人问福西博士，如果早一点制定社会疏远的指导方针，死亡人数是否可以保持在目前预测的最低10万人以下。他说，这取决于病毒是否已经抵达美国，并传播到比早期所知的更远的地方。

 

All of which is why public health experts have said that early widespread testing would have been so critical. “In a perfect world, it would've been nice to know what was going on there," Dr. Fauci told Jim Acosta of CNN, referring to the earliest outbreaks in Asia. “We didn’t, but I believe, Jim, that we acted very, very early in that.”

这就是为什么公共卫生专家说，早期广泛的检测是如此重要。“在一个完美的世界里，如果知道那里发生了什么，那就太好了，”福奇博士对CNN的吉姆·阿科斯塔(Jim Acosta)说。阿科斯塔指的是亚洲最早的禽流感爆发。“我们没有，但我相信，吉姆，我们很早就采取了行动。”

 

Mr. Trump asserted that had he not blocked most travelers from China, the United States would have reached closer to the maximum projected death toll of up to 2.2 million. "When you look at it could have been 2.2 million people died and more if we did nothing, if we just did nothing," he said, then he and the country "have done a great job." In effect, he seemed to be setting up the argument that any death toll below that will be a validation of his handling of the crisis.

特朗普“坚称”，如果他没有阻止大多数来自中国的游客，美国的死亡人数可能会更接近预计的最高死亡人数220万。“如果我们什么都不做，可能会有220万人死亡甚至更多，如果我们什么都不做，”他说，然后他和这个国家“做得很好”。实际上，他似乎是在表明，任何低于这一数字的死亡人数，都将证明他对危机的处理是有效的。

Whatever the eventual number will be, the pandemic of 2020 seems likely to rank with the deadliest of the past century. The worst came in 1918-20 and killed about 675,000 Americans, accounting for many of the military deaths attributed to World War I. Another pandemic in 1957-58 killed about 116,000 in the United States, and one in 1968 killed about 100,000. The H1N1 virus in 2009, for which Mr. Trump has assailed Mr. Obama's response, killed only 12,000. The ordinary flu has resulted in 12,000 to 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.

无论最终的数字是多少，2020年的流感大流行似乎是过去一个世纪中最致命的。最严重的一次发生在1918年至1920年，造成约67.5万美国人死亡，其中许多是一战造成的军人死亡。1957年至1958年的另一次大流行导致美国约11.6万人死亡，1968年的一次大流行导致约10万人死亡。2009年，特朗普曾抨击奥巴马应对甲型H1N1流感的方式，但只造成1.2万人死亡。自2010年以来，普通流感每年导致1.2万至6.1万人死亡。

 

Mr. Trump and his administration have stepped up efforts in recent weeks, expanding testing and seeking to work with governors to address shortages of ventilators, masks and other medical equipment. The president has dispatched medical ships and Army engineers to help, moved to force General Motors to manufacture more ventilators and, after flirting with an early reopening, extended social distancing guidelines until the end of April. Governors have both welcomed the help and complained that it is inadequate.

最近几周，特朗普和他的政府加大了努力，扩大了检测范围，并寻求与州长合作，解决呼吸机、口罩和其他医疗设备的短缺问题。总统已经派出医疗船和陆军工程师提供帮助，开始迫使通用汽车制造更多的通风机，并在考虑提前重新开放之后，将社会疏远准则延长到4月底。州长们既对援助表示欢迎，又抱怨援助不足。

 

Still, Mr. Trump, rarely a reflective person in public, mused about the human toll of the pandemic more than he did in the early weeks of the crisis apparently because it has hit his own circle. As he has in the past couple of days, he referred to an overwhelmed hospital in his childhood home of Queens and an unidentified friend he said had been hospitalized with the virus.

尽管如此，特朗普很少在公共场合反思，他对这场流行病造成的人员伤亡的思考，比危机爆发的最初几周要多，显然是因为它打击了他自己的圈子。和过去几天一样，他提到了自己儿时在皇后区的家，那里有一家人满为患的医院，他还提到了一位不愿透露姓名的朋友，他说他因为感染了病毒而住进了医院。

 

muse 英 /mjuːz/ 美 /mjuːz/ 

n. 沉思；冥想

vt. 沉思；沉思地说

vi. 沉思；凝望

eg. "As a whole," she muses, "the 'organized church' turns me off." 
 “总的来说，”她若有所思地说，“‘组织严密的教会’让我厌烦。”