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gwern comments on Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: Pandemics - Less Wrong
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Have you taken into account the cutting criticisms from Cosma on the bogosity of many power-law claims?
Do you have any examples of a species rendered extinct by a plague in nature? As far as I know, there are no known natural evolutionary paths to produce a super-plague like this:
Some people are genetically immune to AIDS, such transmission would rapidly select for that resistance in humans, while selection on the virus would reduce lethality (losing hosts). Also, HIV has a long incubation period because it is not replicating and killing cells at the rapid rate of the common cold, the tradeoffs here are real.
People were suffering from malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of broad-spectrum antibiotics and antivirals, lack of vaccination tech (to deal with both the flu and simultaneous or opportunistic infections). The Spanish Flu did its damage disproportionately to poor countries, while rich countries got by with a small fraction of the fatality rate.
Today the world is much richer, better fed, and otherwise protected than in 1918-1919.
The FHI survey of global catastrophic risks conference attendees assigned a median probability of 0.05% to a natural pandemic killing off humanity. I would assign a higher existential risk than direct extinction risk, on the basis that social collapse might be irrecoverable, but this is a small x-risk compared to artificial diseases.
How would we know? A pandemic should kill in a generation or two, leaving essentially no fossils (and if there were fossils, would we notice unless it was some sort of weird bone-distorting disease? or even then...), so the deep historical record would not help much. The human historical record is very sketchy since germ theory is so new and so many anciently-recorded species are of uncertain identification (think of all the plants and insects in the Bible we don't know what they actually are), and when humans are competent to record data about wild diseases and plagues, it's generally because they're part of the problem: Tasmanian Devils are being killed off by a nasty communicable cancer (population cut by 70% since 1996, Wikipedia says), but maybe their vulnerability is just due to human-caused stress or something.
Recent observations, not fossil record or ancient history. And extirpation of a connected population from its (substantial) range is an OK proxy.
My first thought, off the top of my head, is Dutch Elm Disease, which developed in Asia, where the trees grew tolerant of it, but then spread to other areas, where the trees had no resistance. Non-Asiatic elms aren't extinct yet, but I think the two options are either: 1) Saved via human intervention, genetic modification, etc., or 2) The susceptible breeds will eventually go extinct as it spreads.
The American Chestnut is not completely extinct either, but has been mostly eradicated by chestnut blight.
I'm not a paleontologist, but don't we see species suddenly vanish from their ranges all the time even excluding the mass extinction events? How do we know that some of these extirpations are not pandemics?
Well, the time period then is quite small. Moreover, we're currently inadvertently killing so many species, that a handful being killed by disease could just get lost in the noise. I suspect there aren't any, but it isn't clear how to test that.