How many people survided?

Answer 1

The plague of 1348-1350 is thought to have killed approximately 1 or 2 thirds of the population of Europe.

This is an estimate with quite a wide margin (between 30% and 60%), but it matches what we know about the disease.

If 100 people were to catch the yersinia pestis bacterium which causes Bubonic Plague today, with modern medical care, the likelihood is that between 30 - 75 of them would die of it. You have a better chance of recovering if you are strong and healthy and well fed, and a worse chance if you are older, younger, weak, underfed or otherwise unwell already. A variant of bubonic plague is pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs and was described in 1349, and this is even deadlier - today only 5-10 sufferers in a 100 survive it.

Unfortunately a lot of the medical opinion of the time was that once you had caught plague you were certain to die (which is untrue), so some people who might have recovered committed suicide in despair, or were left alone and therefore died of hunger while they were too weak to help themselves.

But not everybody catches plague, even in the middle of an epidemic, and some people may have had some degree of immunity. The following wave of plague in Europe came in 1360 and was called 'the children's plague' as it mainly killed young people who had not been born at the time of the earlier outbreak 12 years before. This suggest that the survivors of the 1348 outbreak had developed some immunity which the children did not have.

It is not known exactly what the population of Europe was in 1348, but based on data from wills and information about the death rates in certain professions (which we can estimate based on how quickly people had to be replaced in those positions when the previous job holder died) it seems between 30-60% of the population died across Europe.

Some areas and some professions suffered worse than others. There are the remains of villages in Europe which have never been repopulated since, though it's not clear whether everybody there died, or whether those who survived the plague ran away. Doctors and priests may have had a higher death-rate than average.

It is much harder to estimate what the Death Rate was outside Europe. The plague hit Asia too (in fact it probably originated in South China), and there are reports of terrible devastation. In China it is said to have killed 30% of the population - about 25 million people. I don't know any data about the plague in Africa.

Overall, its possible that the population of the Earth dropped by about 125 million people.

Answer 2

I'm not sure, could you please provide more context or specify the event or situation you are referring to?

Answer 3

More information needed -

cannot answer as does not say survived what

Answer 4

Survive WHAT? Please include this information in your question.

Answer 5

400