[hnlmorg]

I don't disagree with your end point but man are your statistics a mile off...

COVID is somewhere around 1 to 2% (you're off by a factor of 10). And a large part of that reason is treatment. Thus you can't really compare the black death from the medieval period to COVID now considering treatment has gotten better (thankfully, because the 14th-century plague would have between 80% and 100%(!!!) mortality rate depending on the strand).

Since the Bubonic Plague is still around, we can make estimations about how deadly it is given modern treatments, and it's at around 11%. Which, by the way, is lower than some modern outbreaks of coronavirus like MURS (we're fucking lucky that the virus that escaped quarantine is "only" 1-2%).

If you want a really scary fact about the black death, it's that we've already had outbreaks of drug resistant forms in Madagascar. If that were to become the next pandemic then I think we'd all be fucked. Luckily the plague is easier to quarantine than coronaviruses because plagues have a shorter incubation time (that might not be the right term) so people show symptoms earlier and thus are less likely to have asymptomatic periods where they're unknowingly spreading the disease.

[trashtester]

The black death fatality rate of 50% was of the entire population, not the case fatality rate.

Though you have a good point about it being lucky about this virus only having a CFT of around 2%. The next pandemic could be a lot worse, especially if we start to get untreatable bacterial diseases with CFT of 20+%.

[GuB-42]

I often hear how bad antibiotic resistant bacteria may be but how much of a pandemic potential do they have?

It seems that once you remove the antibiotic, the resistant strain is quickly outcompeted by the one that is not. And it seems to match the fact that you typically find resistant strains in places with lots of antibiotics, like hospitals and countries where people and livestock are given antibiotics when they shouldn't, but not that much elsewhere.

[trashtester]

I suppose we don't know exactly where it will end, but we do know that lots of strains are constantly developing resistance to more and more forms of antibiotics, and that it gets progressively more expensive to develop new antibiotics that still work.

According to wikipedia: "According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, three hundred and fifty million deaths could be caused by AMR by 2050"

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance )

If true, that would be >10million per year, on average, or 3x what covid has been doing over the last year.