The black death must have seemed like the end of the world in a fairly literal sense. Rates of change and relative quantities matter when it comes to population

The black death must have seemed like the end of the world in a fairly literal sense. Rates of change and relative quantities matter when it comes to population growth: losing a billion people over a century probably isn't a big deal, but losing a billion people in 14 years would be the single largest loss of life in human history. And yet it would only be a negation of the growth we saw going from 7 billion to 8 billion, which took 13-14 years. In relative terms, lower estimates of the fatalities between 1347-1351 are 30% of the population of Europe. So on a global level we would be looking at more than 2 billion dead in 4 years to get a sense of what that must have been like. 100 million dead in the US alone. That's staggering to think about, and it's no wonder that the pandemic left such an indelible mark on Europe.