Ohoho now let’s get into this shit, shall we? Time for some numbers!
Estimates actually put the death toll between 30 to 60 percent of the European population, there were so many dead and so much variation from area to area you can’t accurately estimate how many it really was
People who got infected by the “Black Death” were to 80% dead within 3 to 5 days, the population was reduced so dramatically that it took between 80 to 150 years to regrow to where it was before, varying from location to location
Some places were almost entirely depopulated. Over 60% of Norway died within two years, China’s population was reduced from around 125 million to 65 million in the late 14th century, at its peak Damascus reported around 1000 dead every day, between 75 and 200 million people died overall in a time where the world population didn’t even reach 500 million.
And let’s not even get into the persecution the Jewish had to face. No wait, let’s do that actually. “The Jews are poisoning our wells” was something people liked to say because they couldn’t think of anything else and hey, why not blame the Jewish? The Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were completely annihilated (not a lot of character development happening in Germany, hmm) and about 2000 more people were killed in the Strasbourg massacre. Simply because they couldn’t figure out where the disease came from and hated the Jewish enough to blame them without evidence
Fun fact, the word quarantine originated in the time of the first global outbreak. It comes from the Italian word for 40, which was the period of time people were isolated if they came from infected areas.
The world didn’t survive the Black Death, too many people died for the disease to spread effectively
And then it came back several more times, including two more major pandemics and many more outbreaks. The most deadly one in modern times was, buckle up, 2017 in Madagascar where it killed 170 people and thousands more were infected.
Now, before someone starts worrying, here’s the good news: thanks to modern medicine the fatality rate was pushed down to around 10%. I think we can all agree significantly better than before.
So next time someone says “the plague went away without vaccines”, now you have numbers. Have fun.
