Secrets of the Dead

-Once Plague was present in the population, especially in a densely populated trading city like Siena.

The extremely contagiou pneumonic version of Black Death would have spread like wildfire.

It is believed that Black Death may have killed up to 200 million people, making it the deadliest pandemic in recorded human history.

-If we think about plague in th context of the recent pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, whic most people are familiar with, that pandemic had less than 1% mortality.

It's spread all over the worl and caused the most incredible economic disruption and the huge societal impact that it had from lockdowns and so on.

-At the point that the World Health Organization stopped collecting data on the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2024, there had been roughly 700 million recorded cases of the disease around the world.

Of these more than 7 million people died, 1% of infections.

According to modern scholars, estimates the mortality rate of the Black Death was roughly 50%.

-So we have to imagine plague as an order of magnitude different with perhaps 3 or 50% of the population dead.

Not less than 1%.

And the impact that that must have had on society.