From The Mind of Merc - Pandemics

Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics ad occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down. Today I was thinking about pandemics (inevitable, really).

A lot of people have been highlighting the theory about a pattern emerging in major plagues that seem to strike around every 100 years:

Year	Occurrence
1720	Plague
1820	Cholera
1920	Spanish Flu
2020	Coronavirus

Two things to note from this:

1)   They (sadly) are not the only plagues to strike – if you want to really depress yourself visit the Wikipedia epidemics page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

2)   On a brighter note, we are able to improve our response to it

The death toll from each of these plagues reads thus:

Year	Occurrence	Death Toll
1720	Plague	c. 1,000,000
1820	Cholera	c. 1,000,000
1920	Spanish Flu	c. 17,000,000
2020	Coronavirus	c. 40,000*

So (with the exception of the Spanish Flu) the mortality rate is improving against pandemics and contagions – especially when you consider the ones that don’t ‘fit the pattern’

Year	Plague	Death Toll	Average per year
541-542	Plague of Justinian	c. 25,000,000	12,500
1347-1351	The Black Death	c.25,000,000	5,000
1855-1960	Third Plague Pandemic	c. 22,000,000	209.5
1960-2000	All reported plagues	52	1.3

Also:

- Smallpox (which killed 500 million in the last 100 years of its existence) was eradicated in 1977

- Polio cases decreased from 49,293 to 74 between 1975 & 2015 (eradicated in Europe in 1998)

- Malaria mortality fell by 60% between 2000 & 2015 (38 countries so far declared Malaria-free)

- Rubella cases dropped from 670,000 in 2000 to 15,000 in 2018 (Australia eradicated it in 2018)

I sincerely hope there will not be another repeat in 2120 but if there is hopefully we’ll again improve our fight against it.

*While admittedly the full toll of the current outbreak is not yet known, so long as people start using common sense rather than selfishness this should start stabilising - i.e. not increasing soon