Maybe that's not true. It's true that new disease pop up and kill people. It's happened multiple times in history, but it's also true that historical conditions were significantly different than modern conditions. People have better hygiene and nutrition today as a group than they did back in the 18th century or earlier.
When the overall population is healthy are they, as a group, susceptible to mass die off from illness? I don't really know. The overall immune response seems to protect people fairly well. In cases where there's a new highly virulent, deadly disease, it doesn't seem to spread very far.
In the past, mass death from disease was often accompanied by famine or war. So if the whole population is massively stressed by things like famine, do they really die of "plagues" or do they really die of bad nutrition?
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