(Paris) The threshold of five million deaths, which is about to cross the COVID-19 pandemic, is much higher than the results of recent viral epidemics, but remains well below that of the “Spanish flu” of 1918 -1919.
This is the case even taking into account the underestimation underlined by the World Health Organization (WHO), which considers that the real toll of the devastation of COVID-19 is two to three times greater than that allowed to calculate the official balance sheets.
Emerging viruses of the 21st century
The human toll of SARS-CoV-2 far exceeds that of emerging virus epidemics of the 21st century.
Sparking a pandemic alert and a global mobilization in 2009, the influenza A (H1N1) epidemic, known as “swine”, thus officially killed 18,500. But this toll was then revised upwards by the medical journal The Lancet with an assessment of between 151,700 and 575,400 deaths.
An emerging virus from China and the first coronavirus to trigger global fear, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) caused an epidemic in 2002-2003 that ultimately only caused 774 deaths.
Influenza epidemics
The toll from COVID-19 has often been compared to the seasonal flu that silently kills every year, without making the headlines. “Globally, these annual epidemics are responsible for around 5 million severe cases, and 290,000 to 650,000 deaths,” according to the WHO.
In the twentieth century, two major influenza pandemics linked to new viruses (not seasonal), that of 1957-58 known as the Asian flu and that of 1968-70 known as the Hong Kong flu, each killed around one million. according to counts carried out a posteriori.
Before that, the great flu of 1918-1919, known as “Spanish” (also caused by a new virus) had done terrifying damage, causing a massacre much greater than that of the Great War and its 10 million soldiers killed. In three successive “waves”, this virus had killed an estimated total of 50 to 100 million people, according to work published in the early 2000s.
Tropical viruses
The death toll from the new coronavirus is much higher than that of the formidable Ebola, whose emergence dates back to 1976.
The last major “outbreak” of “Ebola virus disease” killed nearly 2,300 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) between August 2018 and the end of June 2020. If we add up all the Ebola epidemics for more than forty years, this virus caused a total of just over 15,300 deaths, exclusively in Africa (WHO figures).
However, Ebola has a much higher case fatality rate than that of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus: almost half of those affected die from it on average. But this virus is less contagious: it is transmitted by direct and close contact and cannot be spread by air.
Other tropical viruses such as dengue fever (also called “tropical flu”), whose severe form can lead to death, show less severe tolls. This latest mosquito-borne infection has been on the rise for 20 years, but only causes a few thousand deaths per year (4,032 in 2015, the latest figure available from the WHO).
AIDS and hepatitis
Another killer virus, HIV-AIDS, for which 40 years after its appearance there is still no effective vaccine, caused real deaths at the worst of the epidemic between the 1980s and 2000.
Thanks to the generalization of antiretroviral therapy, the annual death toll of people who have died of AIDS has fallen steadily since the peak in 2004 (1.7 million deaths). In 2020, the death toll was 680,000, according to UNAIDS.
Since its onset, AIDS, which can be treated but cannot be cured, has resulted in an estimated 36.3 million deaths.
Transmitted primarily through blood, hepatitis viruses also represent a heavy burden for humanity: each year more than a million people die of hepatitis B and C, most often by cirrhosis or cancer of the liver. in poor countries.