The year 2020 will be most prominently known for the COVID-19 pandemic, which has currently killed 1.8 million people. Hopefully, with the vaccination process already underway life will get back to a pre-COVID normal in 2021. However, even if it does we can probably expect another epidemic in the new year. Over the last twenty years, around the globe there has been on average about one epidemic a year that has killed at least 1,000 people. Welcome to the new normal. This is a significant increase from the period before 2000, when the average was one or two a decade. See the graph below for a comparison.
Most of the epidemics are not nearly as deadly as COVID-19. Since 1920 (I exclude the Spanish flu epidemic since it started in 1918), only three other epidemics have killed more than 1 million people. Number one is HIV/AIDS, which is estimated to have killed 30 million people so far, followed by two flu outbreaks in the 1950s and 1960s. In the new normal we should expect to have at least one new epidemic somewhere in the world. I just hope that it is one that is not as severe or as widespread as COVID-19.
If you are interested in the details of this data click here.
Hi Christian. These findings are, of course, troubling.
I guess the questions before us are 1) are people becoming more susceptible to viruses? or 2) are viruses more highly evolved now? or 3) both?
Any ideas?
There is a book by an epidemiologist called The Coming Plague. Written about 20 years ago, the author wrote that a major factor is increasing global travel – makes the spread of diseases more widespread.
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