The Hong Kong Flu (1968)
The only reason why this flu wasn’t more lethal with its mortality rate of 5% was mostly due to the fact that it shared a lot of traits with the Asian flu that came a decade earlier. This allowed people to make antibodies a lot faster, although the Hong Kong flu still killed over a million people – half of which in Hong Kong itself.
Cholera (1852)
While we’ve had many cholera pandemics in the past, the 1852 one was particularly brutal. It originated in India and took the lives of over a million people and the disease wouldn’t fully be under control until the 1920s, after the last big outbreak took place.
