Coronavirus Electron Micrograph - Image Source: CDC/Dr. Fred Murphy

« Pire que les épidémies, il y a ce qu’elles nous révèlent : notre haine de l’imprévisible, notre rapidité à pointer des boucs émissaires, notre égoïsme crasse. Il n’est même pas sûr que le posthumain échappe à ce triptyque. »

Quoted of a 2016 article from Usbek & Rica web site

«Worse than epidemics, there is what they might reveal: our hate of the unpredictable, how fast we can be to assign scapegoats and our mean egoism !.»

Well... we can hardly escape the news with the fast pace emulated by the web and social networks. The new 'version' of corona virus is out there and we are not sure how that will evolve in the next few months or, probably, years.
With this perspective, I thought that it might be useful to look back to the human history and try to learn again something. That can help regain a decent view of the present and a rational insight into the future.

I started by searching the web about the history of epidemics. And, again, it was the great wikipedia that offered me a useful insight into the subject: a table of the history of epidemics in the world from the ancient times until today!

After some work, I succeeded integrating this useful table into a database and classified its information using a few related elements to enable enriching the data in the future.

Exposing a rational and none partisan view of the information for such subject is essential in order to contribute with added value (vs. panic!)

Analyzing the collected information using the Trie pattern (we already used for analyzing e-books information) seemed to be a good start point.

We hope that this start point can be useful for a simplified look back into the past... your comments and suggestions to go further are welcome!

Paris 2020-02-25