A black swan is a rare event. It's appropriate for COVID-19, as its death toll is either already higher than some of the outbreaks you listed, or is expected to

A black swan is a rare event. It's appropriate for COVID-19, as its death toll is either already higher than some of the outbreaks you listed, or is expected to surpass them in the near future. Bill Gates called COVID-19 a once-in-a-century pandemic (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2003762 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2003762) Death tolls: • less than 11k: Zika, Ebola, MERS, SARS • 575k for H1N1 (2009) • 1M for H3N2 (1968) • 2M for H2N2 (1957) • 32M for HIV By the end of March, COVID-19 will have killed more than the diseases in the first bullet point. Within a year, COVID-19 will probably have killed more than 2M, so more than each of H1N1, H3N2, H2N2, see this chart https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1233876986025480192 https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1233876986025480192 which I pulled from https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/analyses/first_adjusted_mortality_estimates_and_risk_assessment/2019-nCoV-preliminary_age_and_time_adjusted_mortality_rates_and_pandemic_risk_assessment.html https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/an... Compared to HIV, which is by far the deadliest outbreak in your list with 30 million killed, it would take a while for COVID-19 to kill as much. However some experts say the virus might become endemic, staying around the planet for the foreseeable future, never completely eradicated. If that's the case, then over time it is possible it could end up killing 30M. After all it is more severe than the seasonal flu, and the latter has killed tens of millions over the last century.