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Pandemics have long been a part of human history. This includes various diseases that spread globally and has, in many different periods, created a large-scale population reduction. For ancient periods, pandemics were often conflated with plagues. While the recent COVID-19 pandemic is of concern, many other pandemics have caused far worse social disruption and destruction.

For Europe, it took over 200 years for the population to approach levels of the early 14th century. Historians have argued that although the plague was devastating, it may have helped to spark the Renaissance and innovation, as new inventions were developed because of population decline. Regardless, the remnants of this plague have been found to reoccur or break out in various regions in the Old World, including in Central Asia where it likely originated, until the early 20th century.<ref>For more on the Black Death, see: Cantor, N.F., 2002. <i>In the wake of the plague: the Black Death and the world it made</i>, 1st Perennial ed. ed. Perennial/HarperCollins, New York. </ref>

Almost comparable in scale to the Black Death are the series of mostly smallpox outbreaks that occurred in the New World between 1492 and 1850s, caused by Europeans bringing the disease to Native American populations that had no built immunity to this disease. The Aztecs are a famous example of an empire collapsing mostly because of smallpox devastating the population, but nearly every Native American population, starting with the first populations that greeted Christopher Columbus and other explorers, experienced high death rates, some to the point where they had nearly 100% fatality rates. As a percentage of deaths, these outbreaks were probably the most devastating in history relative to the scale in which they occurred.<ref>For more on the smallpox outbreaks in the New World, see: Thornton, R., 1990. <i>American Indian holocaust and Survival ; a Population History Since 1492</i>, The Civilization of the American Indian Series. Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla.</ref>

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is considered among the most recent viral diseases that began in 2003. Although initially, the global community was slow to contain it, eventually the impact of SARS became limited as containment and quarantine became effectively used. This pandemic is perhaps the least deadly, with less than 1000 deaths recorded.<ref>For more on recent pandemics, see: Honigsbaum, M., 2019. <i>The pandemic century: one hundred years of panic, hysteria, and hubris</i>, First edition. ed. W. W. Norton & Company, New York. </ref>

====Summary====

Pandemics have been regular throughout history. We see that they have changed the fortunes of societies, sometimes devastating them, such as Native American populations, to the point where they have never really recovered to the population levels seen earlier. More pandemics have been likely, as many have been mistaken for forms of local plagues, even if they were pandemics that traveled along trade routes and with travelers. Pandemics in recent history have been more commonly based on forms of flu. Interestingly, few types of flu-like pandemics have been recorded until the late 19th century. However, this simply could be because influenza, or flu, was not known until the 18th century in most of the West.

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