Paris: Global Death Tolls from Covid-19, which will pass five million, are far worse than most other virus epidemics of the 20th century and 21st.
But there are important exceptions.
World War I flu Spain destroyed more than 50 million people in 1918-19, according to some estimates.
It is far more than a Coronavirus pandemic, even if – because the World Health Organization says – Covid’s true victims are two to three times higher than official figures.
Here are some comparisons: Human Toll Covid-19, officially known as SARS-COV-2, far exceeds the other virus epidemics in the 21st century.
In 2009, the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, caused a pandemic and left the official death toll 18,500.
The toll road was then revised upward by a medical Journal Lancet to between 151,700 and 575,400.
In 2002-2003, SARS predecessor of Covid (severe acute respiratory syndrome) which emerged from China was the first Coronavirus to trigger global fear, but killed only 774 people.
Covid-19 toll road is often compared to seasonal flu, which, without achieving the main headline, accounts between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths around the world every year of about five million serious cases, according to WHO.
In the 20th century, two main non-seasonal flu pandemics – Asian flu in 1957-1958 and Hong Kong flu in 1968-1970 – each killed around one million people, according to the amount made afterwards.
The biggest disaster of modern pandemics until now, Spanish flu pandemic in 1918-1919 was also caused by a new virus.
In three consecutive waves it destroyed 50 million to 100 million people, according to research published in the 2000s.
The victim was much higher than 10 million who died in World War I.
The death toll of Covid-19 was much higher than the deadly hemorrhagic fever Ebola, who was first identified in 1976.
The last Ebola outbreak was killed by almost 2,300 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Antara August 2018 and June 2020.
In four decades, the periodic Ebola outbreak killed around 15,300 people, all in Africa.
Ebola has a much higher mortality rate than Covid-19: around 50 percent of infected people die because of that.
But Ebola is less contagious than other viral diseases, mostly because it is not air but transmitted through direct and close contact.
Other tropical viruses such as dengue fever, whose severe form can be fatal, causing lower deaths.
Dengue, which was reduced by mosquitoes, has increased over the past two decades but only kills several thousand people every year – 4,032 in 2015, according to the latest available.
AIDS has so far been the most deadly modern epidemic: Since 1980 nearly 36.3 million people around the world have died of this disease, which affects the immune system and cannot be cured.
There is no effective vaccine found, but retroviral drugs, when taken regularly, efficiently stop the disease in its path and greatly reduce the risk of contamination.
This treatment has helped to bring down the deaths from its peak in 2004 of 1.7 million deaths to 680,000 in 2020, according to UNAIDs.
Hepatitis B and C viruses, especially transmitted through blood, also have high dead, killing more than one million people every year, most often in poor countries.
Covid-19 compared to other deadly viruses
