The impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic illustrate the global-level sensitivity to such threats. As understanding of major hazards is generally based on past experience and there is a lack of good historical precedents, approaches and models currently employed to assess risks and guide responses generally lack transparency and are often associated with huge, unspecified uncertainties. Fundamental challenges arise from the strongly coupled nature of the impacts of a pandemic (i.e. not only on health, but also on the entire socio-economic infrastructure) and their long-term evolution with recovery likely to take many years or, potentially, decades. Here, we outline experience gained in risk assessment within the nuclear industry, which has experience facing similar challenges (assessing long-term impacts in a strongly coupled technical system subject to socio-economic constraints), and assess options for knowledge transfer that may help manage future pandemics and other high-impact threats.

当前 COVID-19 大流行的影响说明了全球对此类威胁的敏感性。由于对重大灾害的理解通常基于过去的经验，并且缺乏良好的历史先例，目前用于评估风险和指导应对措施的方法和模型通常缺乏透明度，并且通常与巨大的、未指明的不确定性相关。大流行影响的强耦合性质（即不仅对健康，而且对整个社会经济基础设施）以及它们的长期演变以及可能需要多年甚至几十年才能恢复的影响产生了根本性挑战。在这里，我们概述了在核工业风险评估中获得的经验，