Pandemic

[[File:The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.jpg|thumb|right|350px|Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Triumph of Death" (c. 1562 CE), depicting the results of a pandemic]]
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{{cquote|It was now, as I said before, People had cast off all Apprehensions, and that too fast; indeed we were no more afraid now to pass by a Man with a white Cap upon his Head, or with a Cloth wrapt round his Neck, or with his Leg limping, occasion'd by the Sores in his Groyn, all which were frightful to the last Degree, but the Week before; but now the Street was full of them, and these poor recovering Creatures…|||Daniel DeFoe<ref>[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.201885|''A Journal Of The Plague Year''] by Daniel DeFoe (1895 [1665]). George Routledge & Sons.</ref>{{rp|314}}}}
A '''pandemic''' occurs when a dangerous [[disease]] breaks out across the world — as opposed to an '''epidemic''', which involves a localized disease. The usual criterion for a pandemic is something that spreads across different continents at epidemic levels and that isn't the seasonal [[influenza | flu]].  Pandemics used to take years if not decades to cover the globe, but due to the increase in travel [[technology]], an outbreak in one part of the world can now quickly spread to a major city and from there to the rest of the world. The term "pandemic" has a connotation of referring to an especially bad outbreak, but it refers to the distribution of the event, not the severity.

Because pandemics are very real low-probability but high-consequence events that strike with little or no warning, there is an intersection between concerned [[government]] officials (who have to plan ahead of time because of how fast a disease may spread) and [[survivalism]] circles. Some of the latter can descend to [[woo]] (for example: "The world will be purged in a tide of blood by [[ebola]]") but there's no one in the relevant fields who ''isn't'' afraid of bird-flu adapting to mammals. 

Notable pandemics include the "Spanish" [[influenza]] pandemic<ref>{{wpa |Spanish flu }}</ref> of 1918-1919, which was encouraged by large numbers of military personnel during/after [[World War I]] suffering from poor sanitation and traveling between continents, and the ongoing [[AIDS]] pandemic which started in the 20th century.  A recent (if less fatal) disease which the [[media]] called a "potential pandemic" was SARS,<ref>{{wpa | Severe acute respiratory syndrome}}</ref> which originated in [[China]] and made its way to Toronto, [[Canada]]. The bird flu virus (H5N1) has been seen as a possible pandemic virus. In May 2009 the World Health Organization<ref>{{wpa | World Health Organization}}</ref> classified [[Swine flu]] (H1N1) as a pandemic — it killed over 14,000 people. (Some portions of the press seemed to think that this [[fake news | pandemic never actually happened]], and that it was [[Cassandra | all scaremongering]].)

The '''[[2019-20 COVID-19 outbreak]]''' (also known, before the [[virus]] was named, as the {{wpl|2019–20 coronavirus pandemic}}) is an ongoing pandemic caused by a {{wpl| coronavirus}} named '''SARS-CoV-2''' (formerly 2019-nCoV), causing the disease named '''COVID-19'''.<ref>
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51466362 "Coronavirus disease named Covid-19"], BBC News, 11 February 2020.
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==See also==
* ''[[Contagion]]'' — a pro-science film about developing a [[vaccine]] to counter a pandemic

==External links==
* [http://www.darkrealmstudios.com/games.php?game=4 Can you kill the President of Madagascar?]

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Disease]]
[[category:Medicine]]

Categories: Disease, Medicine