Although the death toll from the new coronavirus pandemic, which is exceeding five million, is much higher than that of recent viral epidemics, it remains much lower than that of the so-called Spanish flu of 1918-19.
This is true even if we take into account how much the official report is underestimated, according to the World Health Organization, according to which the number of people who died due to complications of COVID-19 is actually two to three higher than the one recorded in government announcements.
Viruses of the 21st century
The new coronavirus pandemic record goes far beyond the two previous 21st century viral epidemics.
The outbreak of influenza A (H1N1), or “swine”, which sparked a global outbreak in 2009 and was declared a pandemic, has officially claimed the lives of 18,500 people. The tally was revised upwards by The Lancet Medical Inspectorate, which estimated between 151,700 and 575,400 dead.
Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the first coronavirus to be detected in China and causing worldwide panic, killed 774 people between 2002 and 2003.
Influenza epidemics
The new coronavirus pandemic record is often compared to that of seasonal flu, which kills silently each year without reaching the headlines. “On a global scale, these epidemics are responsible for some 5 million very serious cases and 290,000 to 650,000 deaths,” according to the World Health Organization.
In the 20th century, two major influenza pandemics associated with new viruses (that is, they were not seasonal), that of 1957-1958, which went down in history as the Asian flu, and that of 1968-1970, which became known as the Hong flu Kong, each cost the lives of about one million people, based on counts made a posteriori.
Before them, the great epidemic of the so-called “Spanish” flu, in the period 1918-1919, which was also due to a new virus, did terrible damage: it caused a million worse than that of the Great War – the First World War – which had 10 million soldiers dead. In three consecutive “waves”, the virus is estimated to have killed a total of 50 to 100 million people, according to studies published in the early 2000s.
Tropical viruses
The death toll from the new coronavirus pandemic is much higher than that of the – even more frightening – Ebola, which was detected in 1976.
The latest “outbreak” of the “disease caused by the Ebola virus” has claimed the lives of nearly 2,300 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between August 2018 and June 2020. he has claimed the lives of just over 15,300 people, almost exclusively in Africa, according to UN figures.
Ebola, however, has a much higher mortality rate than SARS-CoV-2. On average, half of people who become infected succumb. However, it is less contagious. It is transmitted by direct and close contact and cannot be spread through the air.
Other tropical viruses, such as the one that causes dengue fever, also called “tropical flu” and in its most extreme form causes even death, have much lower victim rates. It is transmitted by mosquitoes and the number of infected people has been increasing for 20 years, but the deaths do not exceed a few thousand a year (4,032 in 2015, the last year for which WHO statistics are available).
AIDS and hepatitis
Another deadly virus is HIV, which causes AIDS. Forty years after its appearance, there is still no effective vaccine. The virus caused real millions at the height of the epidemic between 1980 and 2000.
But thanks to the generalization of antiretroviral therapies, the annual death toll from AIDS complications has dropped from its peak in 2004 (1.7 million deaths). In 2020, the death toll reached 680,000, according to the United Nations Joint Program on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS).
Since its onset, the syndrome, which is being treated but patients are not being treated definitively, is estimated to have caused a total of 36.3 million deaths.
The hepatitis virus, which is transmitted through the blood, is also a heavy burden for humanity. Every year, over one million people die from hepatitis B and C, cirrhosis or liver cancer, most in poor countries.
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