Thanks for posting, this paper was very helpful a while ago in guiding my initial forecasts on future pandemics. If anyone, like me, was wondering why they started at 1600, I believe it was the earliest they could go while retaining good quality data on population size (in order to estimate relative pandemic magnitude).
I wondered about what would change if they had managed to go back far enough to include the Black Death (~1300s). My very rough impression (from eyeballing it) was that it wouldn’t substantially affect the conclusions, but a quantified approach to this would be interesting.
Thanks for posting, this paper was very helpful a while ago in guiding my initial forecasts on future pandemics. If anyone, like me, was wondering why they started at 1600, I believe it was the earliest they could go while retaining good quality data on population size (in order to estimate relative pandemic magnitude).
I wondered about what would change if they had managed to go back far enough to include the Black Death (~1300s). My very rough impression (from eyeballing it) was that it wouldn’t substantially affect the conclusions, but a quantified approach to this would be interesting.