Sometimes it's hard to wrap our heads around staggering statistics that happen outside of our lifetimes, or in a place far away. The COVID-19 pandemic killed an estimated 27 million people, likely including someone you know. Still, the big three pandemics in history are bigger: the Black Death of the 14th century, when communicable disease was little understood (50 million dead); the Columbian Exchange, when 90% of the New World population was killed off by European diseases they had no immunity for (48 million dead); and the Spanish Flu, which didn't come from Spain but was fueled by international travel connected to World War I (between 50 and 100 million dead). The millions who died in those pandemics were also a bigger percentage of the world population at the time. We are lucky to live in a time when science can respond to these diseases more quickly than ever. Read more about the largest pandemics ever and how these statistics were compiled at Our World in Data. You'll also see a larger, more readable chart there. -via Digg
Comments (3)
For Spanish Flu, let's use the low-end number of people killed (50M) and high-end for population (i.e., 1920 numbers -- 1.86B). For COVID-19, we have 27M killed and let's use the low-end for population (i.e., 2019 numbers -- 7.765B). This will tend to under-estimate Spanish Flu deaths and over-estimate COVID-19 deaths (so nobody can accuse me of trying to fudge the numbers to make COVID-19 look less serious).
Using those numbers, Spanish Flu killed about 2.69% of the world's population. COVID-19 killed about 0.35%. So an illustration based on proportion of population would have Spanish Flu's dot 7.68 times bigger than COVID-19's.
Would be really interesting to see how huge the ones further in history like the Black Death and Columbian Exchange would be using that method...and to see how the trend is toward smaller and smaller dots as we become more knowledgeable.