I've just been pondering over the past year of crazyness... Do we even know for a fact if previous global pandemics were real? And by real I mean if they really reached the claimed extents.
With today's tech and communications it's hard to make up millions of deaths, and they still managed to come up with a couple. How much easier would this be to pull off in, say, 1920 (spanish flu), or even moreso, in 1350 (black death)?
What's most worrying is that with today's globalization of most urban areas of the world, if these pandemics had an unnatural cause, it's now become easier than ever to make sure enough of the world population suffers the disease, and thus to manufacture the pandemic if those in power stood to gain from it, and if natural forces did not cooperate.