The late Edwin Kilbourne might have had something to say about that. A leading influenza vaccine researcher, Kilbourne was gaunt and goateed; in my book I described him as a cross between Pete Seeger and Jonas Salk. At a conference in the mid-1980s, Kilbourne invented a scenario about a fictitious nightmare virus with qualities that would make it the most contagious, most lethal, and most difficult to control. He called it "maximally malignant (monster) virus," or MMMV. As Kilbourne described it, among MMMV's other nefarious attributes, it would be transmitted through the air like influenza, would be environmentally stable like polio, and would insert its own genes directly into the host's nucleus like HIV.

对此，埃德温·基尔波恩如果还在世，可能会有话要说。他是首屈一指的流感疫苗研究者，瘦骨嶙峋、蓄着山羊胡；在20世纪80年代中期的一次研讨会上，基尔波恩在他假想的情况中虚构出了一种恶梦般的病毒，这种病毒的特性让它具有最强传染力、最致命、也最难以控制。他称之为最大恶性（怪物）病毒（MMMV）。基尔波恩描述，MMMV其他的邪恶特质还包括它会像流感一样藉由空气传播，还会像HIV病毒那样把本身的基因直接嵌入宿主细胞核里。

The novel coronavirus isn't Kilbourne's ghoulish MMMV, but it does have a lot of its scariest properties. It's transmitted through the air, replicates in the lower respiratory tract, and is thought to last for days on countertops. In addition, people can have mild or asymptomatic cases, meaning that even though they are infectious, they often feel healthy enough to walk around, go to work, and cough on us. In that way it's even worse than influenza and even harder to contain.

COVID-19并不是基尔波恩所描述的恐怖MMMV，但确实拥有它最可怕的许多特性。它能透过空气传播，在下呼吸道中自我复制，并被认为可以在一般桌面上存活数日。除此之外，感染者可能症状轻微或无症状，这表示即使他们具有传染力，也往往会觉得自己相当健康、可以四处走动、去上班，还会朝着其他人咳嗽。如此一来，它甚至比流感还可怕，并且更难防堵。

But just as Morse said he's never liked "Most Likely to Endanger Us" lists, Kilbourne told me 30 years ago that he'd conjured MMMV for illustrative rather than predictive purposes. "With viruses, in which only a few changes can make a huge difference in the way the microbes behave, trying to predict the paths of evolution and emergence can be a treacherous affair," he warned.

但正如莫尔斯说他从来不喜欢列“最有可能危害我们的病毒”这类列表一样，基尔波恩也曾在30年前告诉我，他想象出MMMV为的是用于说明可能的危险，而不是预测。他警告称：“病毒的情况是这样的，少数变异就能对微生物的行为产生巨大影响，因此试图预测演化和出现途径可能是件充满陷阱的事?！?/p>