PANDEMIC POWER RANKINGS
1. THE PLAGUE (BLACK DEATH, BUBONIC PLAGUE) - predated good measurements but might have killed half of Europe in like five years. The Barry Bonds of pandemics.
2. THE SPANISH FLU - your granddaddy's influenza pandemic, killed 50 million (estimates range from 17 to 100 million).
3. SMALL POX - wiped out 50M+ over time, including 90% of Native Americans.
4. HIV/AIDS - a slow burn pandemic, it is still operating. Tens of millions have died; tens of millions currently have it.
5. PLAGUE OF JUSTINIAN - sped up the fall of the Roman Empire. Killed perhaps 50 million people in multiple occurrences across a couple of centuries (that's up to 26% of the global population at the time).
6. ANTONINE PLAGUE - 165 to 180 AD, killed 5-10 million people. Probably not actually the plague - could have been smallpox or measles.
7. THE THIRD PLAGUE - technically active from 1855 to 1960, killed perhaps 12 million people, mostly in China and India.
8. THE GREAT PESTILENCE - Mexico (New Spain) in the early 16C. Shortly after up to 8M died from smallpox in 1520, between 1545 and 1580 7-17.5M died from what the Aztecs called Cocoliztli. Now, we think this was a form of salmonella.
9. THE GREAT PLAGUES - Maybe a stretch to call this its own pandemic. The bacteria that caused the Black Death was dormant for a few centuries but had multiple outbreaks in Europe in the 18th, 17th, and 16th, centuries, killing millions.
Honourable Mentions:
ASIAN FLU
RUSSIAN FLU
HONG KONG FLU
CHOLERA
JAPANESE SMALLPOX
Recent, but not as serious as the above:
SWINE FLU (could be an HM)
SARS
MERS
EBOLA
Will COVID-19 slide into the HMs section???
Difficulties in comparing pandemics:
- modern healthcare limits deaths
- modern mobility makes it easier for things to become global
- global population makes raw death counts hard to compare across centuries
(we need to "park adjust" some of these stats. What would SARS or H1N1 have done in the 1800s?)