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It's not cherry picking. We have millenia's worth of evidence that people without immunity to Smallpox die at a very high rate if infected. The indigenous pop
by treis 4y ago
It's not cherry picking. We have millenia's worth of evidence that people without immunity to Smallpox die at a very high rate if infected. The indigenous population of the Americas had no immunity when exposed to small pox. So they died at a very high rate.
- WalterBright 4y agoHistorians have no idea what the pre-Columbian population was, so estimates of death rates have huge error bars.
- treis 4y agoWe know the mortality and virulence of smallpox and the other diseases that the indigenous population had never seen. From that you can estimate a death rate and it's clear that the toll would have been devestating. How devestating might be subject of some debate but no doubt that it was very bad.
- WalterBright 4y agoNo, we don't, because we have no remotely accurate numbers on the pre-Columbian population. The reason we have reasonably accurate measures of the mortality of the Black Death in medieval Europe is some areas kept written records of who died and who didn't. Yet the mortality rate of that is still in dispute.
- treis 4y agoI'm not sure what part you're disagreeing with. Do you dispute that we know smallpox's mortality rate? Or that we have a reasonable idea of what it (and other diseases) would do to a population with no natural immunity?
- WalterBright 4y agoI dispute that we have a reasonable idea of how many native americans it killed, because we have no idea how many pre-Columbians there were.
- treis 4y agoAFAICT nobody is talking about "how many" except for you. My argument was percentage based and for that the total population is irrelevant.
- WalterBright 4y agoHow many matters very much, as that determines the percentage.
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoBut you can go the other way though. If you have the ending number, and some other way to estimate a percentage, that would give you the starting number.
- WalterBright 4y agoIt's a pretty big stretch to extrapolate from a few samples to two continents.
- treis 4y agoNo, the virulence and mortality of the disease determines the percentage.
- WalterBright 4y agoUm, virulence and mortality is expressed as a percentage.