The Deadliest Pandemics in History

The infographic ranks the pandemics by total deaths, but "deadlyness" should be compared by normalizing against global population I think.

After some searching I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...

Here are their first 7 "deadliest" normalized against estimated global population and resorted.

figures in parenthesis are (total deaths / world population at end of pandemic) in millions

end date - plague - global mortality rate

---------------------------------------------

565 Plague of justinian: 2.27% (50 / 220)

1351 Bubonic Plague: 0.56% (25 / 443)

1977 Smallpox*: 0.4% (500 / 12,000?) [0.8% if assuming total pop was only 6000M)

1547 Cocoliztli: 0.33% (15 / 460)

1918 Spanish Flu 0.27% (50 / 1,840)

1520 Mexico Smallpox Epidemic 0.11% (5 / 460)

2020 HIV/AIDS 0.05% (32 / 7,300)

2020 Covid19: 0.0016% (1.13 / 7,300) (global deaths as of 22 Oct 2020)

I wasn't sure how to handle smallpox, their total deaths estimate spans a 100 year period from 1877 to 1977. Global population increased from 1.33 billion to 5.9 billion people, and over the 100 year period many more than 5.9 billion people were alive and then died (i.e. the 1.33 B alive in 1877 are not the same as those alive in 1977).