7 Deadly Epidemics of the Past

With covid-19 taking over the world, it only makes sense that we’d take some of that abundant lockdown time to take a stroll through medical history and look at some of the other deadly epidemics and pandemics that have plagued our history.

We’ll take a look at some minor epidemics from recent history and the biggest ones that we’ve ever had when going a bit further back in time. If nothing else, this’ll prove that covid-19 isn’t that bad – at least not yet.

The Plague of Justinian

This plague was our first registered encounter with the Bubonic Plague, and it wiped out nearly half the population of Europe. At the time (from 541 to 542 A.D.) this meant that we saw about 25 million casualties. This, sadly, is almost nothing compared to our biggest run-in with the Bubonic Plague, which we’ll see later.

The Flu Pandemic

This 1918 epidemic that was caused by an influenza strain that caused the deaths of an appoximated 20 to 50 million people. This was one of the first influenza pandemics that also killed healthy young adults, apart from the elderly or the juvenile. The mortality rate of this pandemic was a whopping 10 to 20%!

The Black Plague

Probably the most known pandemic in our history books, this strain of the Bubonic plague took the lives of 75 million to 200 million people in the mid-1300s. We’re still not quite sure how it happened, but it’s assumed that the strain hopped on some fleas living on rats that were all over the merchant ships in those days. Europe, Asia and Africa were utterly devastated in the wake of this pandemic.