The current epidemic of coronavirus is an opportunity to take stock of the previous diseases which have caused thousands, even millions of deaths all over the world, in the history of our civilization.
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“We felt that Covid-19 can be characterized as a pandemic“. Here are the words of the Director-General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at a press conference in Geneva on March 12. The opportunity to remind you what is the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic.
For this, we will take the definitions of Larousse. An epidemic is therefore the “development and rapid spread of a contagious disease, most often of infectious origin, in a population “. A pandemic is a “epidemic spread to the entire population of a continent, even to the whole world”.
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The coronavirus is not the first pandemic in the history of mankind, far from it. Spanish flu, which killed between 25 and 100 million people at the end of the First World War, is considered the “mother of all pandemics”. We come back to this one in the gallery opposite as well as all the other pandemics and epidemics that have ravaged the human race, from before Christ to today.
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