PARIS, France – The global death toll from COVID-19 surpassed three million on Saturday, with the pandemic killing more people than most other 20th and 21st century viral epidemics.
But there were notable exceptions. According to some estimates, the Spanish flu wiped out 50 million people after the First World War. And over the decades, 33 million people have died.
Here are some comparisons:
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Influenza epidemics
In 2009, the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, caused a worldwide pandemic, leaving an official death toll of 18,500.
It was later reviewed by The Lancet medical journal to between 151700 and 575,400 deaths.
This brings it close to seasonal flu, which according to the World Health Organization covers between 290 and 650,000 deaths worldwide each year.
Israelites stand up for flu shots on 25 December 2015 during flu programs (FLASH90)
In the 20th century, two major non-seasonal flu pandemics – Asian flu in 1957-1958 and Hong Kong flu in 1968-1970 – each killed about one million people, according to the census conducted thereafter.
The greatest disaster of modern pandemics to date, the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, also known as Spanish flu, wiped out 50 million people, according to research published in the 2000s.
Other viral epidemics
The death toll from COVID-19, which appeared in central China in late 2019, is much higher than that of the hemorrhagic fever Ebola, which was first identified in 1976.
In four decades, periodic Ebola outbreaks have killed about 15,000 people, all in Africa.
Ebola has a much higher mortality rate than COVID-19: about 50 percent of people infected die from it.
Illustrative: Health workers dressed in protective gear begin their shift at an Ebola treatment center in Beni, Congo DRC, 16 July 2019. (AP Photo / Jerome Delay)
But Ebola is less contagious than other viral diseases, namely because it is not transmitted in the air but is transmitted through direct and close contact.
AIDS is by far the deadliest modern epidemic: nearly 33 million people around the world have died from the disease, which affects the immune system.
No effective vaccine has been found, but retroviral drugs effectively stop the disease in its tracks and reduce the risk of infection.
This treatment, according to UNAIDS, helped reduce the death toll from its peak in 2004 of 1.7 million deaths to 690,000 in 2019.
The hepatitis B and C viruses also have a high death toll, killing about 1.3 million people annually, mostly in poor countries.
In 2002-2003, COVID’s predecessor SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) originating from China was the first coronavirus to ignite global fears, killing only 774 people.
Three million is equal to …
By comparison, the figure of three million people represents a little more than the population of Jamaica or Armenia.
It is also three times the toll of the war between Iran and Iraq that raged from 1980 to 1988, or 2,000 times more than the 1,500 who died in the sinking of the Titanic.
Cemetery workers in protective gear walk to the funeral of a woman who died from complications related to COVID-19 at Inahuma Cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 13, 2021. (AP Photo / Silvia Izquierdo, File)
In the past month, more than 10,000 people die from the coronavirus every day.
According to the UN, this is just as much as the 10,000 children who die of hunger every day.
