As of September 28, the Covid-19 epidemic had already caused more than a million deaths, according to the American Johns-Hopkins University, which has been following the spread of the epidemic since February 2020.
While the pandemic we are going through is by far the deadliest of the 21st century, many other viruses have ravaged humanity since Roman times.
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A look back reveals certain constants: unclear origins, a disputed transmission, imprecise balance sheets… or even an economic impact which will have brought down entire empires.
And always, these viruses that were carried by travelers, merchants and soldiers, agents of a health globalization that began at the beginning of our era.
The Roman Empire, crossroads of civilizations ... and contagions
The first widely documented epidemic was dubbed the "Antonine Plague", named after the dynasty of emperors who then reigned over Rome, the Antonines (between AD 96 and 192).
Its symptoms, described in Galen's notes and re-studied since, correspond more to smallpox than to plague.
The alert was given in 165, during the siege of Seleucia du Tigre, about thirty kilometers from present-day Baghdad (Iraq).
The large movements of troops linked to this military campaign explain the wide spread of the virus to the four corners of the Empire.
According to several counts, it will be between 5 and 10 million deaths from 165 to 190. An estimate made from the assumed mortality rate and the economic collapse reported over the period.
DR
The second epidemic having exceeded one million victims, bears the name of "Justinian plague".
The Emperor Justinian arrived on the throne of Constantinople in 527. In the summer of 541, testimonies describe a searing fever in the city of Peluse, a city in Lower Egypt, located northeast of the Nile Delta.
The hypothesis of contamination along the Silk Road is now favored.
And this, thanks to the analysis of bodies exhumed in Bavaria, confirming the Mongolian origin of the strain taken.
The rest is clear, because abundantly documented.
The disease reached Constantinople in February 542. We then spoke of more than 10,000 deaths per day in the metropolis.
According to several estimates, the epidemic will cause between 25 and 50 million deaths, from the west of Europe to the borders of the Empire, in Persia.
These estimates were mainly made from documented city-by-city counts.
A Middle Ages already globalized
Chronologically, the following massive epidemic broke out on the other side of the world, unknown to Westerners at the time, in Japan, from 735 to 737. The culprit: smallpox.
The first symptoms were reportedly observed in August 735 in the city of Dazaifu, in the north of the island of Kyushu.
Between 25% and 35% of the Japanese population are believed to have died of the virus.
That is to say nearly a million people, according to an assessment mainly made from the tax revenues recorded by the Japanese administration.
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The hecatomb of the Amerindian populations during the conquest of the New World (15th-16th centuries) is henceforth attributed mainly to smallpox and typhus.
In the wake of the landing of the conquistadors, three epidemic waves are said to have caused the death of more than 22 million people, or 90% of the indigenous population.
The first wave, attributable to smallpox, would have killed 8 million in 1520. The second, from typhoid fever this time, would have claimed between 5 and 8 million victims in 1545. The last, between 1576 and 1578, would have decimated the half of the remaining Aztec population.
The impact of the first wave on the entire Aztec population is difficult to gauge, as the Spaniards did not begin to identify them until 1540.
Burial of plague victims in Tournai.
Detail of a miniature from “Chroniques et annales de Gilles le Muisit”.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Besides smallpox, the Black Death remains the most important epidemic known in the Middle Ages.
From 1346 to 1353, it decimated the Old Continent, part of Asia and northern Africa.
Its origin and human toll are still the subject of much debate.
For many years, many historians agreed on the fact that the bacillus had spread along the Silk Road to reach Constantinople in 1347, then Messina, Genoa and Marseilles.
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Other researchers have explored the hypothesis of development in Sub-Saharan Africa.
As for the toll, estimates range between 75 and 200 million deaths.
Europe alone would have lost 30 to 50% of its population.
Estimates from parish registers, bequests and wills… or extrapolations based on populations of notables, better identified at the time (doctors, notaries, municipal councilors, monks, bishops).
Plague and cholera
France will not regain its initial population level until the second half of the 17th century.
However, the Old Continent will not see epidemics disappear, far from it.
During the Great Century, the plague traveled through Europe regularly, until it reached Boston in 1657. In 1665, the great plague in London decimated between 75,000 and 100,000 people, or nearly 20% of the population.
Some accounts show three million deaths in the 17th century and 600,000 in the next.
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The last great plague epidemic will spread in 1855, from Yunnan in China.
Besides the Middle Kingdom, the Indian continent will also pay a heavy price: 10 million deaths.
It was 1894, in Hong Kong, that the Franco-Swiss Alexandre Yersin succeeded in identifying the bacillus and determining its mode of transmission: flea bites clinging to the rats that swarmed in Asian ports at the end of the 19th century.
Cholera in Russia, seen by Le Petit Journal illustrated supplement of December 1, 1912. DR
It is also the century of cholera.
Described by an officer of Vasco da Gama in 1503 in Calicut, the virus will take more than 400 years to be spotted in the Middle East, Europe and America.
The discovery of its bacillus by Pacini in 1854 was not enough to stop the spread of the virus, which toured the world during seven successive pandemics.
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The seventh pandemic, declared in Indonesia in 1961, is still raging today, particularly in Equatorial Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
The influenza of the 20th century
After the devastation of the First World War, and its nine to ten million victims, the badly named “Spanish flu” claimed 20 to 50 million lives according to the Institut Pasteur.
Recent reassessments even cite the figure of 100 million deaths, or nearly 5% of the world's population.
The Spanish press is the first to speak of the epidemic, hence its name.
The virus would in fact have been spotted for the first time in Kansas, in a military garrison, before crossing the Atlantic, towards the French trenches.
The first cases of respiratory infections were observed in 1916 in the British camp at Etaples (Pas-de-Calais).
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Less well-known, the so-called “Asian” and “Hong Kong” flu, spotted in 1957 and 1968 respectively, also killed more than a million people.
The first, from the H2N2 strain, was first observed in Singapore.
The second, identified H3N2, probably appeared in Central Asia, before being spotted in the British counter.
In France, more than 30,000 people were reportedly swept away in two months.
Le Monde dated 3 December 1969 devotes a note to it: "The cold wave which recently covered France has caused several epidemics of influenza, affecting in particular the southwest".
Political life at the time was focused on the management of “after 68” and the hasty departure of General de Gaulle.
Professor Dellamonia, at the time internal to Lyon, remembers: “We did not have time to bring out the dead.
They were piled up in a room at the back of the intensive care unit ”.
Before the Covid-19, imprecise assessments
The twenty-first century has already been marked by several major epidemics.
SARS, projected from southern China to more than 30 countries, will officially only kill 774 between 2002 and 2004.
In spring 2009, "a fourth generation descendant of the Spanish flu virus" was detected on Mexican soil: H1N1.
The WHO qualifies the situation of pandemic on June 11, 2009. The American CDC mentions a toll of the staggering amplitude for the time: it is estimated that between 151,000 and 575,000 people died from the consequences of H1N1.
Estimates 15 times higher than official figures, confirmed by the WHO.
This is the last pandemic case to date with such a vague assessment.
This imprecision is mainly attributable to the lack of screening and diagnosis of deaths, particularly in Africa and Asia.
In France, the epidemic has not had the feared impact.
According to its latest report, dated April 6, 2010, the INVS reported 312 people dead in the country.
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More recently, the Ebola virus reappeared between late 2013 and March 2016, mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone, DRC and Liberia.
The international mobilization of the time is mainly explained by the extraordinary lethality of this virus, close to 50%.
The WHO assessment lists a total of at least 28,000 cases for more than 11,000 deaths.
A balance sheet that the organization will see upwards subsequently, estimating that nearly 10,000 people would not have gone to screening centers and would have died in remote areas.
The international mobilization has mainly resulted in limiting the international spread of the virus.
More than three billion dollars were then collected to overcome it.
The virus reappeared in August 2018 in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, before being quickly brought under control.
This new wave would have caused at least 2,273 deaths.