When was the last flu pandemic declared?

Global pandemics - when was the last flu pandemic and what other pandemics have there been?

 

Health officials have warned that coronavirus could soon be declared a pandemic.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said the spread of the deadly flu virus around the world is not yet at pandemic stage - but acknowledged it has the potential to become one.

Coronavirus, or Covid-19 as it is officially known, has so far claimed the lives of more than 2,500, with just 23 deaths occurring outside of China where the outbreak began.

According to the WHO, a pandemic is declared when when a new influenza virus emerges and spreads around the world, and most people do not have immunity.

Influenza pandemics are not hugely common with around three occurring every century for the last 300 years.

Viruses that have caused past pandemics typically originated from animal influenza viruses.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/world-news/last-flu-pandemic-declared-17814014

From what I have found the last one by the WHO was the 2009–2010 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic.

21 hours ago, ubonjoe said:

From what I have found the last one by the WHO was the 2009–2010 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic.

Yes,the most recent declared flu pandemic the world has seen was the 2009 swine flu. 

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(seasonal)

 

Good info in this article.

An influenza pandemic is an epidemic of an influenza virus that spreads on a worldwide scale and infects a large proportion of the world population. In contrast to the regular seasonal epidemics of influenza, these pandemics occur irregularly – there have been about 9 influenza pandemics during the last 300 years.

 

Some stats below in a chart, in the link at the very bottom:

 

• Spanish flu (1918–1920) Main article: Spanish flu. ...
• Asian Flu (1957–1958) ...
• Hong Kong Flu (1968–1969) ...
• Russian Flu (1977–1978) ...
• H1N1/09 Flu Pandemic (2009–2010) ...

 

In 2018-2019 In total, the CDC estimates that up to 42.9 million people got sick during the 2018-2019 flu season, 647,000 people were hospitalized and 61,200 died. That's fairly on par with a typical season, and well below the CDC's 2017-2018 estimates of 48.8 million illnesses, 959,000 hospitalizations and 79,400 deaths.Jun 20, 2019

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic

Edited February 27, 20206 yr by 4MyEgo

I don't know when you declare a pandemic, like you are asking about the flu, when about 30,000,000 in the US have had the flu since 1 Oct 2019 and there have been about 30,000 deaths.  What about the rest of the world.  I think right now with the flu, it is ho-hum another flu season!

 

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm

 

Yearly flu deaths are 300k to 600k.

 

2500 isnt much. It will end up say 30k. A fraction of the flu.

 Influenza spreads around the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.^[1][4]

Influenza A virus, AKA flu or Spanish flu killed 50 million people 100 years ago. Last year it killed 650,000 people.

 

Black plague killed much, much, much more people than influenza.

 

Common cold is caused by coronavirus and I think many people had this as child. Current coronavirus COV19 is different strain and killed 2000+ people.

 

The Swine Flu Pandemic in 2009 infected about 60 million people worldwide of whom 300,000+ died.  SARS and MERS are both corona viruses that spread out of China, but not widely and were not called pandemics.  COVID-19, aka SARS-COV-2, has a higher transmission rate than SARS or MERS and has already reached the pandemic level, which WHO will no doubt announce soon.

 

The Spanish Flu was an H1N1 virus, like the 2009 Swine Flu, but unlike the annual common flu.