In the pandemic, the threat of natural disasters still looms. The thought of facing both at once worries some who’d be in charge By Drew Kann, Leyla Santiago and Priscilla Alvarez, CNN ...

> Most common natural disaster: Epidemic (25 incidents since 1900) > Deadliest disaster since 1900: February 1996 bacterial disease (4,071 deaths) > Total population: 21.5 million.

But the pandemic has been consuming resources, and travel restrictions hamstring movement. “That means when your local capacity is overwhelmed, you can’t reach out for more help,” McKinnon says.

Though a mere 7.0 on the magnitude-moment scale, the location of the quake and the country’s underlying poverty made it the deadliest single natural disaster ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

But we can all take a deep, healthy breath: It’s not true. There don’t tend to be spontaneous epidemics in the wake of natural disasters. As a World Health Organization team explained in a 2007 study ...

The IFRC report, titled “World Disasters Report 2020: Come Heat or High Water,” uses what’s known as “extreme event attribution” to show that over the past 10 years, climate- and weather ...

Max Roser/Oxford Martin Institute As the chart shows, very few people die from epidemics today compared to the early 1900's, which saw disasters like the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 to 100 ...

Natural disasters usually bring out the best in people. But researchers found that the pandemic made us meaner. And lazier. And more introverted.

Other types of disasters include epidemics (like the medieval Black Death and the 1918 flu), famine and wars. Image. Downtown Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in the aftermath of the tsunami there in 2005.