History of Pandemics

Though COVID-19 may have felt like nothing we’ve experienced before, pandemics have been frequent throughout history. This chapter summarizes major global pandemics in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: the seven cholera pandemics, 1918 influenza, H1N1 swine flu, SARS, and MERS. We describe the viruses that cause the pandemics, the demographic it targets, how the diseases spread, key learnings, and more. Finally, we dive deeper into COVID-19, compare it with the 1918 influenza, and draw conclusions about what specialists have learned about the pandemic response for the future.