AIDS cases have been to every country in the world which easily satisfies as a pandemic.
Epidemic is different with Covid19 not yet qualifying.
What’s useful about separating the ideas is discovering the root cause. Scurvy used to be epidemic among sailers, making it easier to find the root cause and treatments. Highly localized diseases generally have a specific local cause.
AIDS has not spread very rapidly. It has taken nearly 4 decades to reach its current spread. Covid has the potential to infect most people in the span of 12-18 months. It’s categorically different. And AIDS is easily avoided!
Rate of spread has nothing to do with the definition of pandemic. It took literally thousands of years for Smallpox to reach the America’s, but it achieved worldwide spread before eradication.
Malaria on the other hand has also killed hundreds of millions of people but as it’s a tropical disease with 93% of the cases occurring in Africa it’s not a pandemic.
Again person to person spread results in pandemics, making a definition based on geographic spread useful.
The definition of epidemic that I quoted above uses the word “rapid” and the phrase “short period of time”. The definition of pandemic requires there to be an epidemic. Those are not my invention, they are from Wikipedia!
Rapid as in a large number of cases a week, thus “within a short period of time.” Not rapid as in how long the disease existed.
The malaria epidemic is thousands of years old, nobody cares how quickly it spread 20 thousands years ago. Edit: Excluding academic intrest.
PS: And by Covid 19 not qualifying as an epidemic I meant it’s not an epidemic in every country. It however is an epidemic in several countries and will likely become an epidemic in most if not all country’s very quickly.
Malaria is not a tropical disease, although it's been eradicated in most tropical areas and not yet eradicated in most non-tropical areas.
The reason malaria is not a pandemic isn't the fact that it's been eradicated in some areas, but the fact that it's endemic. Only epidemic diseases can be pandemics; endemic disease (e.g. seasonal flu) cannot be. This is by definition.
Epidemics and pandemics relate to some change from the previous situation whereas endemic diseases refer to stability. This informs our policy responses.
I think you meant the reverse of what you said in the first paragraph. It’s true that Malaria (ague) cases occurred in Medival Europe as far north as England, but it was very much climate dependent. With massive differences between what became the Nordic countries vs say Italy. However, I have never heard a significant objection to calling it a tropical disease.
Epidemic is different with Covid19 not yet qualifying.
What’s useful about separating the ideas is discovering the root cause. Scurvy used to be epidemic among sailers, making it easier to find the root cause and treatments. Highly localized diseases generally have a specific local cause.