Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has nearly doubled the number of people on the planet who have been quarantined to avoid the spread of the coronavirus.
According to him, according to the decree, 1.3 billion people must remain in their homes, the total number of people in some form of isolation is about 2.6 billion people, which is one third of the total population, according to Agence France-Presse. .
This is more people than were alive during the Second World War.
The virus reportedly infected 425,000 people and killed 18,900. The accuracy of reported infections varies greatly from country to country due to the proliferation of testing.
But outside of these grim statistics, at the level of everyday life, it has become difficult to quantify the extent of the impact of the coronavirus on the human population in the months since the very first case appeared in mid-November 2019.
Governments around the world have responded with various forms of restrictions that currently affect about one in three people and affect everything from transportation, commerce, public gatherings, and in many cases the ability to leave their home altogether.
The number of people affected today exceeds even the most ambitious events that come to mind. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the two largest global conflicts in human history – World War I and World War II – involved a total of about 135 million people.
In 1940, the world's population was 2.3 billion, still less than the number of people in isolation today.
Statista estimates that the cumulative estimated number of people traveling on the largest annual migrations – Chinese New Year, Prayagraj Kumbha Mela in India, Thanksgiving in the United States and the Islamic pilgrimages of Arba'in and Hajj – is 690.5 million.
One of the only comparable events to affect humans on this scale is the 1918-1919 Spanish flu. Although the situation is very different epidemiologically, one thing in common is the extent to which it is covered relative to the world's population. The virus infected one third of the population, which at the time was about 500 million.
