But you can go the other way though. If you have the ending number, and some other way to estimate a percentage, that would give you the starting number.
It is a percentage. Smallpox kills roughly 30% of infected people. Doesn't really matter if if 100k, 1M, 10M or 100M are infected. Roughly 30% of them will die.
Like I said, it's a great stretch to extrapolate a few samples to two continents of people. There's a lot of genetic diversity in the Americas, and different lifestyles. Thinly populated areas are not going to spread the disease like thickly populated ones, etc.
Besides, the claimed number was 90% now it's 30%?
Also, look at the way Covid behaves. Despite modern statistics, what a mess of unpredictability and controversy it has. Medieval statistics, which are often little more than guesses, are going to be far less reliable.
> It is a percentage
I know what percentages are. I was simply amused by your claim that the percentage could be determined from the percentage.
>Like I said, it's a great stretch to extrapolate a few samples to two continents of people. There's a lot of genetic diversity in the Americas, and different lifestyles. Thinly populated areas are not going to spread the disease like thickly populated ones, etc.
A few samples? Smallpox has been around for millenia and has caused epidemics with significant mortality where ever it was found. The idea that something about the genetic diversity or lifestyles of the indigenous populations of the Americas is frankly ridiculous. Especially given the numerous and consistent first hand reports that Smallpox and other diseases ravaged the native population.
>I know what percentages are.
Do you? Because you keep talking about the total population or the number of killed when I speak about death rates and percentages.
> Smallpox has been around for millenia and has caused epidemics with significant mortality
No argument there. But "significant mortality" is not a percentage. Accurate records were not made or kept in a way that would provide a percentage. In the case of the American population, there are no records. Just WAGs (Wild-Ass Guesses).
> The idea that something about the genetic diversity or lifestyles of the indigenous populations of the Americas is frankly ridiculous.
Really? It's true for every other population. Do you not know that city dwellers are far more susceptible to epidemics than rural or nomadic tribes? Did you know that Covid infection rates vary from state to state, country to country, in ways that defy easy explanation?
> Especially given the numerous and consistent first hand reports that Smallpox and other diseases ravaged the native population.
What first hand reports in North America? In South America, do you really believe the Spanish Conquistadors kept accurate epidemiological records?
> Do you?
Yes. To compute a percentage you need a numerator and a denominator. The denominator in this case would be the population of two continents, which nobody has any idea of.
If Covid has taught us anything, it is that childishly simplistic extrapolations of statistics across orders of magnitude are fraught with error, gross error, and catastrophic error.
