The duration of historical pandemics

Abstract

Extreme value theory can address the tail risk of a pandemic. In particular, a generalized Pareto distribution accommodates well the data from 72 major historical pandemics. One interesting finding is that the distribution of fatalities is heavy-tailed. Here, we analyze the duration of such historical pandemics. We find pandemic duration is heavy-tailed, too, with infinite variance. We also find power laws that help predict the lower bound of pandemic duration in-sample.