During the outbreak of novel coronavirus, cities are locked down and borders are closed. Science, on the contrary, is becoming more open. And this “open science” is already making a difference.

Soon after the epidemic started in China, a research team from Fudan University in Shanghai successfully sequenced（测定序列）the DNA of the virus. But they didn’t keep the information to themselves. Instead, they placed the sequences on GenBank, an open-access data platform, so researchers around the world could download them for free and start studying the virus.

Due to this openness, pharmaceutical（制药的）companies across the globe are now able to work simultaneously to develop a vaccine. “There may be room for multiple different vaccines for different purposes and different age groups,”Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security in the US, told Al Jazeera.“The bigger menu we have of vaccines, the more resilient（有适应力的）well be against coronavirus outbreaks in the future. ”

Major drug companies around the world are also sharing their study results. Remdesivir, a drug originally developed by US company Gilead Sciences to treat Ebola, s found to be promising in fighting against the novel coronavirus. Currently, two trials of the drug are already underway in China, and the results might be available as soon as April, according to The Verge.

This openness in science is going to be even more crucial in the future. With climate change, increasing globalization, and population shifts, epidemics will not go away, and might even become more frequent, Dan Barouch, a Harvard Medical School professor, told Harvard Magazine.

He said, “No one group can do everything. It has to be a coordinated（合作的）approach. But I do think that the world has a greater sense of readiness this time to develop knowledge, drugs, and therapeutics（疗法）very rapidly.

Every epidemic is indeed a crisis, but it can also be a learning opportunity. One redeeming（补偿的）factor of the COVID﹣19 outbreak is that it is helping science adapt for the better.

The start of the U.S. Atlantic hurricane season is just over two weeks away and forecasters are expecting particularly high activity this year. With warmer than usual conditions expected in the North Atlantic this summer, meteorologists (气象学者) have predicted that the season could produce eight or more hurricanes.

While forecasters cannot predict how many hurricanes — if any — will make landfall, the potential for dangerous storms to strike the southern and eastern coasts brings an additional problem for authorities(专家) already struggling with the COVID-19.

Experts say that the COVID-19 is affecting the capabilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other organizations involved in responding to natural disasters.

Retired U-S. Army Lieutenant General Jeffrey Talley, who now leads global efforts on disaster management at IBM's Center for the Business of Government, said that with FEMA and other authorities engaged with responding to the COVID-19, resources will be limited if a hurricane strikes.

“When we look at a disaster.I think of it in terms of how we prepare for, respond to and recover from those types of events,” Talley said “Right now we’re in the middle of the response of COVID-19. None of us are really sure how long it's going to last and how the response to disasters is going to be different, say, two months from now, six months from now, so on and so forth,” he said.

According to Talley, the COVID-19 could complicate the response to a hurricane by interrupting the flow of emergency supplies to areas where they are urgently needed at key moments.

Social distancing and stay-at-home orders will also force authorities along the south and east coast to rethink how they manage people who must leave their homes in the event of a disaster. While many states are already lifting some lockdown restrictions, social distancing will still be important for many months to come.

Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health disease among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern, according to a recent study of more than 100,000 students nationwide by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State. Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months, according to the annual national survey by the American College Health Association.

The causes range widely, experts say, from mounting academic pressure at earlier ages to overprotective parents to engagement with social media. Anxiety has always played a role in the development of a student’s life, but now more students experience anxiety so acute that they are seeking professional help. Like many college clinics, the Center for Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Central Florida (UCF)— one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing universities, has seen sharp increases in the number of clients: 15.2 percent over last year alone.

Anxiety has become characteristic of the current generation of college students, said Dan Jones, the director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Appalachian State University in Boone, N. C. Because of increasingly pressures during high school, he and other experts say, students arrive at college preloaded with stress. Accustomed to extreme parental oversight, many seem unable to govern themselves. And with parents so accessible, students have had less incentive to develop life skills. “They can’t tolerate discomfort or having to struggle,” Dr Jones said.

More often, anxiety is mild and temporary, the indication of a student under the control of a normal developmental issue-learning time management, for example, or how to handle rejection from a sorority. Mild anxiety is often treatable with early, modest interventions. But to care for rising numbers of severely troubled students, many counseling centers have moved to triage protocols (分诊措施). That means that students with less urgent needs may wait several weeks for first appointments.

Like many college counseling centers, UCF has designed a variety of daily workshops and therapy groups that implicitly and explicitly address anxiety, depression and their triggers. Next fall the center will test a new app for treating anxiety with a seven-module cognitive behavioral program, accessible through a student’s phone and augmented with brief videoconferences with a therapist. It also offers semester-long, 90-minute weekly therapy groups, such as “Keeping Calm and in Control”, “Mindfulness for Depression” and “Building Social Confidence” -for students struggling with social anxiety.