Pins matching tag:Pandemic

Genoese galleys carrying plague from the Black Sea put in at Messina in Sicily, and the disease went ashore with them. Over the next seven years it killed perhaps a third of Europe - up to 50 million people - and took two centuries to be made good.

A camp cook reported sick at Fort Riley's Camp Funston in Kansas, and within days hundreds of soldiers were down with influenza. It is the first recorded outbreak of the pandemic that killed more people than the war it travelled with - somewhere between 25 and 50 million.

Six weeks after declaring a public health emergency, the WHO's Director-General told a Geneva briefing that COVID-19 could be characterised as a pandemic - 118,000 cases in 114 countries at the time. Most of the world's lockdowns began within a fortnight.