That’s a reasonable challenge. However, the definition you cited (from Wikipedia) is the classical definition of a pandemic, and according to the WHO, does not take into account disease severity and transmissability, and would imply relatively harmless influenza outbreaks would also classified as pandemics—which is somewhat controversial in terms of definition. So depending on how you define a ‘pandemic’ (i.e. with or without disease severity and transmissibility taken into consideration) my original claim may be true.
Fair point. It does seems like “pandemic” is a more useful category if it doesn’t include a whole bunch of “things that happened but didn’t kill a lot of people.”
That’s a reasonable challenge. However, the definition you cited (from Wikipedia) is the classical definition of a pandemic, and according to the WHO, does not take into account disease severity and transmissability, and would imply relatively harmless influenza outbreaks would also classified as pandemics—which is somewhat controversial in terms of definition. So depending on how you define a ‘pandemic’ (i.e. with or without disease severity and transmissibility taken into consideration) my original claim may be true.
Fair point. It does seems like “pandemic” is a more useful category if it doesn’t include a whole bunch of “things that happened but didn’t kill a lot of people.”