The greatest pandemics
— In the Human History
My country of origin - India climbed up to the third position in the world corona rankings replacing Russia from the position. We are no more the the country with lowest Cases/million people.
Also, while India’s current total active cases are a quarter of the USA’s, but our DAC(daily active cases) at times match to the half of the USA’s DAC. Which means we currently have the fastest growing graph. And if continued the same way, we could reach up to the top position real soon. The clock is ticking and so are humans.
But for now, we have time to read about similar outbreaks — maybe of worse kind.
The Black Death
Or the Great Mortality, better known as the Plague; was the deadliest pandemic in human history. Caused deaths of 25–200 million people(We don’t know the exact count) between 1347 and 1351. You wanna compare? Covid-19 has taken 0.5M lives so far — within half a year and growing.
Contrary to the title name, the Black Death took the lives of white and colored people too. Not via air but this boy spread through flea (Insects/Organisms). How did they stop it? No vaccine but quarantine. Same rules: Pack yourself in and only step out for essentials.
Did it finish? Yeah! But only to come back in 1665, and cause more Havoc — Took down 20% of London’s population! The damn plague started spreading through cats and dogs (as well). These cute animals had to be slaughtered for human survival.
Are you picturing four-legged zombies?
Surprisingly, the plague is still around today — shows up in rural areas in the western US. Fret not as we’ve managed to create a vaccine somewhere in the 1800s.
The Spanish Flu
Met us a century ago. The Spanish flu was an influenza pandemic that spread the world (Not just Spain) b/w 1918–1919. This influenza-infected 500 million — one-third of the world’s population back then, and ended up killing 50Million people in total.
What sets this one apart is its attraction towards the young and healthy. Yup this one triggered more young adults (20–39 years of age) than the old.
Spread how? Same as COVID. Don’t touch me, don’t come near me.
The Spanish flu didn’t even originate from Spain. It’s just that Spain was the most affected.
So, Covid-19 becomes American virus and not Chinese, for now, with this logic.
Swine Flu
I skipped many in the between, now this one is recent. ‘Swine flu’, occurred in 2009. Super easy guess where it emerged from Pigs, in America.
This is basically the same virus(H1N1) from the Spanish flu (above). And targeted children and your age people more than older adults. Likely because older adults had immunity from the previous exposure to H1N1. This pandemic ended in August 2010.
Ebola
This one wasn’t the greatest but did get a lot of popularity. Mostly because it’s recent. Your kids won’t remember this one.
However, the ebola virus has a high casualty rate — 40% and it killed 11,310 after hospitalizing 28,616 people between 2013 to 2016. Rookie numbers when you put them next to Corona’s or other viruses above and the reason to it is that this doesn’t spread through the air or contact. Instead, it’s spread by direct contact with the body fluids(Blood, Saliva, Milk, Urine, Semen, etc..) of the infected person.
Considering it’s not as easy contagious, these numbers are pretty huge.
HIV/Aids
Oh, you’ve started smiling? But this no happy virus, although popular for spreading with happier moments.
HIV(Human immunodeficiency virus) was first detected in Humans in the early 1980s — but known to emerge from African chimpanzees in the 1920s. No, stop smiling.
This one is very widespread too, over 76Million active cases and 35Million deaths (as per UNaids.org). And the rate of 2Million new cases each year even now. It’s however not considered scary as this doesn’t transmit through the air either, but similar to Ebola from above is transmitted through the body fluids.
We can wrap up this one, it’s pretty popular.
The End
That’s all for this issue. This article is a part of my Knowledge•Day newsletter — A place to know a lot, about a lot. You can read my most recent issues from here:
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