DICING WITH DEATH

Life may be short, but it's a lot longer than it used to be, says the author of a new book on human mortality.

- MARK BROATCH

Fear of the unknown: an engraving by German publisher and engraver Paulus Fürst, circa 1656, of a plague doctor in protective clothing. The beak mask held spices thought to purify the air and the wand was used to avoid touching patients.

The number of people who have died from Covid-19 in the two years since it emerged has now passed six million-an unfathomable toll given the relative sophistication of life in the 21st century.

The real figure could be much higher. But it is still dwarfed by the toll from a virulent strain of influenza that killed 50 million people in the brief period between March 1918 and early 1919. Hundreds of millions more became sick from the so-called Spanish flu. The strain was particularly severe for young adults, and in June 1918, half a million German soldiers fell ill. World War I supersized the pandemic by easing its passage around a world that didn't yet have passenger aeroplanes. In the US, about 675,000 people died, at a time when the population was a third of its current size.

Covid has been tragic. But without the advent of better hospitals, improved public hygiene and - crucially and unprecedentedly-a vaccine developed within 12 months, the death toll in a globalised world linked as never before could have truly catastrophic.

Vaccines have been key to our survival as a modern species. In fact, the world faced a little-known second crisis just a few decades after the Spanish flu, when an influenza epidemic broke out in Hong Kong, in 1957. Thanks to the American vaccinologist Maurice Hilleman's quick work, millions of doses of a vaccine were quickly produced, averting a potential crisis. Hilleman's team went on to develop more than 40 vaccines, including those for measles, mumps and hepatitis A and B. It is estimated that his vaccines still save more than eight million lives a year.