The global coronavirus pandemic declared on March 11th by the World Health Organization (WHO) is the second pandemic declared in the 21st century -the first was influenza A of 2009- but despite the fear they arouse, they were less deadly than other diseases that have hit humanity throughout history.
The definition of a pandemic includes an epidemic, which is the sudden onset of a disease that affects a large part of the population, but extends to many countries regardless of lethality, according to the WHO, who today put the coronavirus in that category.
The most deadly pandemic to date was smallpox, which caused some 300 million deaths, left its consequences for the sick and was eradicated 40 years ago.
The second was measles, which has caused 200 million deaths worldwide today, the spread of which, like Ebola, is prevented by vaccination.
The third, the bubonic plague, was active until 1959 and killed more than 12 million people, while typhus left more than 4 million dead, but it is not a danger in the modern world.
Cholera, which registered major pandemics in the 19th and 20th centuries, exceeds three million deaths.
The 20th century began with the spanish flu , which killed in 7 months five times more people than the fighting of the First World War, with some 50 million deaths.
Years later, between 1957 and 1958, the Asian flu, which appeared in China and arrived several months later in America and Europe, caused a total of 1.1 million deaths.
Another million deaths caused the so-called Hong Kong flu, which went around the world between 1968 and 1970 and killed many children, a disease that entered history as the first pandemic of the modern era..
And the century ended with what is considered the fifth most important global pandemic, HIV, which since 1981 killed more than 32 million people.
Viruses and epidemics will continue to emerge and accompany humanity throughout its history, but man will continue to make efforts to overcome them. Just remember the fourteenth-century black plague, which devastated a third of Europe or smallpox, which caused more deaths than the world wars.
