English: A timeline of historical pandemics

I have brought together estimates of death tolls from different pandemics in history for this article, which we have visualized in a timeline below.

The size of each circle represents one pandemic’s estimated death toll. Pandemics without a known death toll are depicted with triangles.

This overview shows us the vast impact that pandemics have had over history.

You can see that the largest pandemics – such as the Black Death – killed more than half of the population. Several pandemics have swept through the population repeatedly: in just the last two hundred years, seven major pandemics were caused by cholera, and another seven were caused by the flu.