Covid-19 pandemic among the worst in history?

THE coronavirus disease 2019 or Covid-19 pandemic has led governments to enforce extraordinarily restrictive measures, including the lockdown of cities, regions, if not the entire country; the prohibition of gatherings of more than 10 people; and the closure of non-essential industries and businesses, rendering millions jobless or without means of livelihood. The reaction of the world is understandable considering the impact that pandemics have already had in the history of mankind. Pandemics, at one time or another, left the global population reduced by as much as one-third. One pandemic named after the Roman Emperor Antoninus has been cited by historians as a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and a later one is said to have prevented the Byzantine Emperor Justinian from reunifying the same empire that had been divided into Eastern and Western halves. The severity of the steps taken to stop a contagion might not have been without precedent in ancient history. A plague has been theorized to have caused the people to abandon cities or civilizations in the Indian subcontinent and Latin America virtually intact.

An aspect of these pandemics that makes them so terrifying is that they concern diseases that hitherto have been completely unknown. Even the most advanced countries of the day would have little or no means to fight their outbreak. And, even in days that the means of travel were relatively slow, the disease could spread like wildfire. How much more today? The coronavirus has spread to all continents. It is safer to assume that infectious diseases know no borders. And for all their advances since the invention of the microscope, science and medicine are left clueless on how to find a cure to the new disease or even how symptoms may be effectively treated