The first two known disease epidemics wiped out whole villages in China over 5,000 years ago. Since then, plagues have hit ancient Athens in 430BC, killing 100,000. The Antonine Plague, which lasted 15 years, from 165 to 180, killed 5,000,000. The 21-year-long Cyprian Plague, from 250 to 271, killed 5,000 people a day. The Justinian (Bubonic) Plague of the Byzantine Empire may have killed 10% of the world’s population. Starting in 1346, the Black Death traveled from Asia to Europe, killing 50% of Europe’s population. It all started by a bacteria carried on fleas on rodents. The Cocolizli Epidemic in Mexico in 1545 was a salmonella hemorrhagic fever that killed 15,000,000. The diseases brought to the Americas by European explorers in the 1500’s killed 90% of the Inca and Aztec populations. Then came the great plague of London in 1665-1666, the Russian Plague of 1770, yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793, the Russian Flu of 1889, polio in America in 1916, and then, from 1918 to 1920, the Spanish Flu, which infected 500,000,000 people! After that, the 1957 Asian Flu, which I got as a child, almost killed me. Then, another Chinese flu killed 1,100,000 people worldwide, and another Chinese Flu in 1968 (the Hong Kong Flu) killed 4,000,000 people globally. After that, we’ve had Swine Flu, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika, and now, the seventh mutated strain of Coronavirus to hit us in the past 60 years.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that Nature will not stop its onslaught of killer infectious diseases.