This paper utilizes a material -based research method to make a contrastive study of metaphorical expressions about COVID-19 in English and Chinese. The research finds that in the initial stage, based similar physical experience, English and Chinese communities tend to choose the same source domain, for example a large number of war metaphors and sports metaphors have emerged, reflecting the commonness of experience and cognition. On the other hand, other types of metaphor construction in both languages reflect the characteristics of different experiences of each speech communities, such as the most typical exam-oriented education metaphor in Chinese and the abundant natural disaster metaphor and supernatural ability metaphor in English.