Covid 19 Ranks Among Deadliest Disease Outbreaks in History
Five years after the virus was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2025, worldwide deaths from Covid-19 are estimated at 19-36 million by sources like the World Health Organization and The Economist. This death count places the coronavirus among the deadliest disease outbreaks in recorded history. Epidemics and pandemics have taken their toll on humanity throughout the centuries and even though much has changed in the modern age, the devastation from the loss of life in disease outbreaks has remained the same.
Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, published data on the seven deadliest disease outbreaks in history in 2021 and even then, estimates of the extrapolated Covid-19 death toll already placed the pandemic among them. While Covid-19 might be more similar from an outbreak perspective to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920, another one is actually closer in time to it: The HIV/AIDS pandemic. First reported in 1981, the disease spread rapidly around the world and peaked at 1.6 million annual deaths in 2004. Since then this number has halved and experts believe that the pandemic as a public health threat can be ended by 2030 due to advanced medications and public health campaigns limiting the disease's spread. While fewer people die of AIDS today, the disease has claimed 27-48 million lives globally.
The outbreak on the list that claimed the most lives is the so-called Black Death plague epidemic that took place in Europe, North Africa and Asia in the Middle Ages, from around 1334 to 1353. The outbreak is estimated to have killed up to 200 million people, decimating the European population by 30 to 60 percent. There are actually three outbreaks of the plague, a bacterial disease, among the deadliest pandemics and epidemics in the world, also including the Plague of the Justinian in late antiquity (541-549) as well as a third outbreak of the disease in the 19th and 20th century, killing 12 million people mostly in India and China.
The latter was - together with the less deadly cholera and influenza outbreaks of the 19th century - the first pandemic that reached the entire world, while previous outbreaks were also often classified as Old World pandemics. The New World smallpox epidemic is an abnormality in this context, as it ravaged native American populations that did not have a built-up tolerance to the disease, killing 25 to 55 million people in the 1500s and 1600s. Finally, the Spanish flu is often called the first true pandemic as with the increased connectedness of the world in the 20th century came the faster spread of disease.
The words epidemic and pandemic refer to a sudden increase of the spread of an infectious disease, in a limited area or all around the (connected) world at the time. While some diseases can theoretically be eradicated, most can only be limited in their spread and are poised to keep existing, especially if they can be re-transmitted to humans from the environment. Five years after being declared as such, Covid 19 is still referred to as a pandemic by the WHO, but is not considered a global health emergency anymore
