The 7 deadliest pandemics in history
From the Plague of Justinian to COVID-19, the epidemics that hit humanity hardest.
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1
“Spanish” flu
An H1N1 virus spreads in three waves, carried by troop movements during the First World War.
≈ 50 million deaths
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2
The Black Death
Carried from Central Asia along trade routes, bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis) reaches the Genoese trading post of Caffa, from where ships spread it across the Mediterranean in the autumn of 1347.
≈ 25 million deaths
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3
Plague of Justinian
The first plague pandemic attested with certainty: ancient DNA confirms Yersinia pestis.
≈ 15 million deaths
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4
COVID-19 pandemic
The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, identified in Wuhan at the end of 2019, spreads to every continent within weeks.
≈ 7 million deaths
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5
Asian flu
A new influenza virus, H2N2, emerges in southern China in early 1957.
≈ 1 million deaths
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6
Great Plague of Marseille
The ship Grand-Saint-Antoine, back from the Levant with a contaminated cargo of silk, arrives in Marseille on 25 May 1720.
≈ 120,000 deaths
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7
West African Ebola epidemic
The largest Ebola epidemic in history starts in a village in Guinea’s forest region, then reaches the capitals of three countries with fragile health systems.
11,325 deaths
HIV/AIDS, which has killed more than 40 million people since the 1980s, smallpox and the cholera pandemics are not yet in the atlas. Ranking based on the disasters in the Mémoire du Globe atlas, using the most commonly accepted tolls. For older events, the figures are orders of magnitude.
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Explore it on the 3D globe. See this disaster among 88 of the major disasters in history, from Pompeii to the present day, with its spread, its timeline and comparable events.
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