psst: it's the malaria, not the covid

 covid is going to lead to food shortages and riots and maybe revolutions in the near future: NOT because it killed a lot of folks (yes, it killed a lot of old people, but not younger folks who do the work of the world), but because of the shutdown of the economy.

But the real killers go on unchecked: 

Librivox has an audiobook on how malaria destroyed empires. LINK

now, with "global warming" we will see hysteria about mosquitoe linked disease killing people, but malaria was common in the southern USA, and the area of Southern England that had swamps was known to kill outsiders who moved there: because they had no resistance to the disease.

etext here.Besides these direct statements there are

frequent references to districts passing out 
of cultivation. Examples are Juvenal, Sat. x. 
1 02, "vacuis Ulubris"; 4 Horace, Ep. I. xi. 7. 
" Gabiis desertior"; Lucan vn. 391, and 
Horace Odes, n. 15. How far this depopula- 
tion was due to malaria is a difficult question to 
answer. Lucan lays the blame upon the great 
civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and its 
continuation after the death of the former. 5 
The probability is that civil war made a 
district desolate, and then malaria entered 
and rendered it uninhabitable. Certain it is 
that southern Latium must once have been 
healthy and prosperous. Later on it was a 
waste bog with scarcely an inhabitant.