We are all survivors

HISTORICALLY, neither wars nor famine have caused as much loss of life as diseases, yet human beings, one way or another, have done their best to survive and pick themselves up, whatever they had gone through.

The Black Death of the Middle Ages is the most well-known example of a deadly pandemic. Estimates of fatalities in Europe range between a third and a half of the total population of the time. Recurrent bouts of plague in China, coupled with the dislocation they caused, reduced a population of 123 million in 1200 to 65 million in 1393.

Earlier epidemics were also devastating, but their full impact outside regions where reliable written records were kept can usually only be guessed. From the mid third century BCE, Chinese records report repeated epidemics that claimed millions of lives. Evidence from Ancient Egypt suggests an epidemic caused death on a large scale during the reign of Akhenaten, around 1335 BCE. In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, in 430 BCE, perhaps a third of the population of Athens died from a disease that had already ravaged the Persian empire. In 541-44, during the reign of the emperor Justinian, plague devastated the Byzantine empire, and killed half the population of Constantinople, then one of the world's largest cities.