There have been an estimated six to seven million deaths worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic. While that’s horrible, it is far from the deadliest Pandemics in history!

1. 7 of the Worst Deadliest Pandemics in History
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Pandemics in History
There have been an estimated six to seven million deaths worldwide
during the Covid­19 pandemic. While that’s horrible, it is far from the
deadliest Pandemics in history!
This recent pandemic was a sobering reminder that our society can
easily crumble under the pressure of microscopic organisms. Viruses
Table of Contents
1. Pandemics in History
2. 1. The Plague of Athens This plague swept through the city of Athens
3. 2. The Plague of Justinian lasted from 541 to 549 CE
4. 3. The Black Death
5. 4. The Great Plague of London
6. 5. Smallpox in the New World
7. 6. Cholera in London Although the Great Plague of London
8. 7. The Spanish Flu of 1918 The Spanish Flu pandemic swept across the globe
9. 8. HIV and AIDS The HIV and AIDS epidemic
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7 of the Worst Deadliest Pandemics
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2. and bacteria have held power over the human race for millennia, and
history is littered with pandemics that shook the human race to its
core. Yet, despite all the death and illness, we continue to come
back together and grow. In fact, some people have even used past
pandemics to learn more about preventing and lessening the
impacts of the next one.
The following eight pandemics are among the worst in history – both
in death count and in the cultural scars that have been passed down
to us today.
1. The Plague of Athens This plague swept
through the city of Athens
x
x

3. Plague of Justinian lasted
from 541 to 549 CE
Around 430 BCE during the Peloponnesian War. Scholars aren’t sure
what the exact disease was. Still, it killed between a quarter and a
third of the population in approximately five years, leaving Athens in
social chaos and at a disadvantage in the war against the Spartans.
Most of our information on this plague comes from Thucydides, a
Greek historian who survived the plague. He described how highly
infectious it was, and he mentioned how it began with a high fever
and progressed through vomiting, diarrhea, ulcers, and
unquenchable thirst.
The doctors at the time were powerless to stop the disease, often
catching it themselves while caring for the sick. No remedy seemed
to work for everyone, and infected people sometimes found
themselves without anyone to nurse them back to health. Although
some people did survive, the corpses piled up in the streets; it was
not uncommon to burn several bodies together on a funeral pyre.
The city’s overcrowding exacerbated the plague – Pericles had
called all Athenians inside the city to protect them from the Spartan
army, but Athens was not built to support so many people.
The disease raged in crowded lodgings, and everyone, regardless of
social class or wealth, was vulnerable. The instability brought about
by the illness led to civil unrest, spiritual questioning, and the end of
the Golden Age of Athens.
2. The Plague of Justinian lasted from 541 to 549
CE
Historians believe this was the first time the
bubonic plague reached European
shores, and it was deadliest around
Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Em
pire.

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As the rest of Europe crumbled into the Dark Ages after the fall of
Rome, the eastern half of the empire lived on as the Byzantine Empire.
These people were a light amidst the dark in terms of art, science,
and academia in Europe, but even their science could not explain
the plague.
Modern scholars believe that the plague reached Constantinople
from trade ships returning from Egypt – a recently conquered land.
Emperor Justinian was ruling at the time – thus the pandemic’s
name – and he brought the Byzantine Empire to its
height. Unfortunately, that meant that he also accidentally exposed
his people to the plague.
The plague arrived in the ports of Constantinople, but it soon
spread; at its height, it was killing about 10,000 people a day. Bodies
were piled outside and stacked indoors, and although some people,
like Emperor Justinian, survived the plague, there was no medical
understanding of what happened.
The plague tore across the Byzantine Empire, reaching Europe,
Africa, and the Middle East. There are no firm numbers for how
many died, but someplace it at thirty to fifty million people.
The Plague of Justinian marked the start of the decline of the
Byzantine Empire; losing so many people to a mysterious illness
over a few years was a shock from which they never fully recovered.
3. The Black Death
main content – Black Death

5. This is probably the most famous pandemic It was an outbreak of the plague from
1347 to 1351 that killed an estimated third to one­half of the European population..
The epidemic actually started in China around 1334 and
slowly moved west, but it did not reach European shores until
October 1347, when twelve ships arrived in Messina that would later
be called “the death ships.” Most of the sailors were already
dead, and the last few were in the final throes of the disease – the
people boarding the ship were horrified, and the local authorities
drove the boats away. It was not enough to save Europe, though,
and the plague spread due to a lack of medical and scientific
knowledge.
This was a time of great panic as the Europeans were forced to deal
with disease and death on a scale they had never seen before.
There was no time for proper burial rituals – bodies were piled in the
streets and either cremated or buried in mass graves.
As people died by the thousands, the church began to lose its power
over people. Since they had been powerless to stop the plague,
people began looking for answers elsewhere.
The Black Death was also an equalizer – no one was safe, which meant
the rich were just as susceptible as the poor. As the people began to
implement quarantines better, the disease finally subsided. The
people came back together and started rebuilding a better life for
everyone.
4. The Great Plague of London

6. Great Plague of London
The Black Death was not the final outbreak of the plague – it
resurfaced in Europe every few years, and London was one of the
most notorious places for the outbreaks. In April 1665, London’s
last plague outbreak began; it is believed that fleas from infected
rodents were once again the cause, but this outbreak would prove to
be one of the worst in England.
Before this, England had created laws to isolate the sick – by the
early 1500s, it was required that plagued houses are marked clearly
– and you were required to publicly disclose if you lived in a house
with infected family members. All of this did not stop the Great
Plague of London.
Over the course of about seven months, an estimated 100,000
people died in the city and surrounding villages. Infected people

7. Smallpox in the New World
were forcibly shut into their houses, and all public entertainment was
canceled in an attempt to stem the infection rate.
Historians are not sure what ended the Great Plague; isolating the
sick certainly helped, and some historians believe the Great Fire of
London also helped. Normally, huge fires are not seen as good
things – this one started on September 2, 1666, and burned down a
significant part of London in only four days. Although it left massive
destruction, the fire also obliterated the plague; there would never be
another massive plague outbreak in London again.
5. Smallpox in the New World
Smallpox was endemic to the
Old World; the people had dealt
with it for centuries and had built
up some immunity. Of course,
people still died from smallpox,
but the death rate in the New
World displayed the complete
devastation that this disease
could bring.
When the first European explorers arrived, they unwittingly brought
their diseases; the native people had no immunities and were
suddenly hit by catastrophe as smallpox ran through the population,
killing tens of millions.
The Europeans brought other diseases, like influenza and measles,
but smallpox is remembered as being particularly destructive to the
native populations. Historians believe that at least ninety percent
of the population died in a little over a century from European
diseases; whole civilizations perished from the pandemic, and
farmlands were abandoned, which some historians believe led to
global climate change as the Earth cooled in the sixteenth century.
Smallpox and other diseases nearly obliterated the population, which
actually aided the Europeans’ conquests. As millions of people died,
the great indigenous civilizations were too weak to stop
colonization. Smallpox and other European diseases famously

8. The Great Plague of London
helped Hernán Cortés defeat the Aztecs in 1521, and Francisco
Pizarro conquered the Incas in 1532 by destroying much of the
native armies before the battle could commence. As Europeans
continued to arrive, they found the European diseases that had gone
before had reduced the size of the indigenous groups and paved the
way for European conquest.
6. Cholera in London Although the Great Plague
of London
The Great Plague of London was the last
outbreak of the bubonic plague, London
had not finished suffering from
pandemics. In the early and mid­
eighteenth century, cholera killed
thousands of people.
The disease comes from contaminated drinking water – which
London certainly had plenty of. London did not have an effective
sewer system in the 1800s, so wastewater often came into contact
with drinking water. Human waste was often piled in courtyards or
overflowed from basements, contaminating the water.
The doctors at the time, though, did not know how cholera
spread; they only knew that there was no cure; the rapid onset of
symptoms like diarrhea, vomiting, erratic heartbeats, and dry,
shriveled skin with a blue tinge frightened the public.
The doctors theorized that cholera spread through foul air called
“miasma,” but removing human waste from the streets did not curb
cholera outbreaks because the waste was being dumped into the
River Thames – the source of most of London’s drinking water.
In 1854, John Snow discovered that cholera was spread through

9. water, not through the air. He determined that the 1854 outbreak
came from the Broad Street water pump; although he was able to
convince city officials to remove the handle from the pump, the
medical community did not believe that cholera was waterborne until
1866.
London began implementing urban sanitation, which ended the
cholera outbreaks that had claimed thousands of lives. Some
historians believe the cholera epidemic claimed nearly
forty thousand lives before it was brought under control with good
sanitization.
7. The Spanish Flu of 1918 The Spanish Flu
pandemic swept across the globe
The end of World War I, killed an estimated fifty million people before
its end in 1920. Interestingly, the Spanish Flu did not begin in Spain.
They had never imposed strict censorship on the press during the
war because they were neutral, so they were reporting freely on
the disease. That meant that people believed the flu started in Spain,
which is how it got its name.
The spread of this flu was actually advanced by soldiers returning

10. home from war; the cramped conditions had led to the development
of diseases, and the poor nutrition on the home front left many
people vulnerable to illness. This pandemic was also a time of panic
– the disease devasted both urban and rural areas, and a significant
portion of its victims were young adults, who are usually unaffected
by seasonal cases of flu.
The virus also moved more quickly than doctors and scientists could;
some died within hours of the first symptoms, and others suffocated
from fluid in their lungs after just a few days.
The sudden death toll – especially after the deaths and injuries from
World War I – had sharp economic effects worldwide. Manufacturing
dropped by half in the United States; farming stalled in Africa; famine
spiked across the globe.
The pandemic finally ended when enough people developed an
immunity to the Spanish Flu, but illness and death were certainly not
the welcome home that many soldiers had expected after the war.
8. HIV and AIDS The HIV and AIDS epidemic
HIV and AIDS The HIV and AIDS epidemic

11. Is still ongoing; it probably developed from a chimpanzee virus that
crossed over to humans in the 1920s in West Africa. It then spread
across the globe, officially becoming a pandemic in the 1980s.
(Today, many see HIV and AIDS as an epidemic, as the spread of
the disease has slowed and is more localized to certain countries.)
HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus, and it is spread
through the exchange of bodily fluids. Once infected, the virus
attacks the immune system; eventually, so much of the immune
system will be destroyed that the body cannot defend itself from
illness. This is called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or
AIDS.
When the pandemic exploded, it was met with mass hysteria. There
was little understanding of how the virus spread or who it could
infect. Since it initially affected the gay community, which was
already highly stigmatized at the time, they became even more
alienated than they had been before. It wasn’t until 1987 that
medication was discovered for treating HIV. There have been other
advancements in HIV treatment, but there is still no cure. Still,
with early testing and a medication regimen, people who contract
HIV can live nearly normal lives.
This pandemic continues to affect life today; Sub­Saharan Africa
continues to be severely affected by HIV and AIDS, a situation that is
still being studied by scientists to determine if the HIV strain is more
virulent in Africa. However, access to medications is ever­
improving, giving hope that we may eventually see an end to the HIV
and AIDS epidemic.
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