Three kinds of paper
The Black Death, the 1918 flu, and COVID each broke the count. They did not leave the same kind of record.
A plague is two events. One happens to the population. The other happens to the paper that would have described it. The three cases people reach for are not three versions of the same evidence.
Before any bill existed
The Black Death of the fourteenth century is earlier than any count this site would recognise. There are chronicles, bishops' registers, and tax lists that go thin. There is no weekly bill, no cause code, and no national total a later office could revise. The scale is not seriously doubted: in the places it reached, a great share of the people died. A single global figure, of the sort the WHO now publishes for a calendar year, cannot be made for it. London's bills of mortality, which Graunt was still reading three centuries later, are what a city builds after it has learned to fear a plague it can name week by week. They are not a record of 1348.
Written down as something else
The influenza of 1918 sits inside a war, and inside a registration system that was real and incomplete. Many of the deaths were written down as pneumonia or bronchitis, which is what the last illness looked like and what the form had a line for. The number people repeat is about 50 million deaths worldwide. Serious estimates run well to either side of it. It is an argument about incomplete certificates, not a tally that was closed in 1919. The war years are the subject of A year the rate cannot describe. Here it is enough that the same months hold both a battlefield and a respiratory infection, and that the forms were not designed to separate them cleanly.
Two numbers, and they are not the same
COVID-19 is the first of the three in which the argument can be held in public with modern registration. The honest measure is excess mortality: deaths above the number a recent run of ordinary years would have led anyone to expect. The WHO's assessment for 2020 and 2021 together is 14.9 million excess deaths, within a range of 13.3 million to 16.6 million. Its estimate of all deaths in 2021 is 68 million. The UN figure for 2023, after the peak, is 61.7 million. That movement is why the Ledger's headline sits where it does, and it is already set out in Why 1.95 deaths per second? This piece does not repeat the division. It only marks the change in the record. For the first time, a pandemic arrived in a world that could say both “certified as this virus” and “more people died than the recent baseline,” and could show that those two numbers were not the same.
Smallpox is the other infectious story on this site, and it is a different one. The one that ended is about a disease declared gone. Nothing in these three cases ended in that way.
This is not health advice. It is an account of what three epidemics did to the record. It says nothing about any one person's risk. If you have concerns about your health, speak to a doctor.
Sources
- WHO, 5 May 2022: 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021, within a range of 13.3 million to 16.6 million.
- The 68 million deaths in 2021, the 5.4 million deaths reported as COVID-19, and the UN figure of 61.7 million for 2023 are set out in Why 1.95 deaths per second?.
- The familiar global figure for 1918, about 50 million, is an estimate with a wide range. It is not a closed tally, and it is not a figure the Ledger uses on a counter.