Pandemic lethality

With all the news about the coronavirus, many are wondering about the impact of a truly global-wide pandemic on world population. I got to thinking about the population implications of such pandemics and ran a few numbers.

The Spanish flu is thought to have killed about 50 million globally when the estimates for global population was about 1.75 billion for lethality of 3 percent. If the true lethality for coronavirus is 3 percent, that would work out to about 231 million deaths for the current world population of 7.7 billion. For comparison, current US population is about 330 million.

The “Bla...