10 years ago I would have said that’s crazy talk.....now not so much.
Plague usually is talked of as starting in 1348. That’s when it hit England and got recorded. It was earlier elsewhere. Arab data suggests 10 yrs earlier in central Asia. Chinese records show origins in Mongolia. There is no confidence about where it started, but no one suggests China. It almost wiped out China.
The critical records of Plague are from Oxen Ford (now Oxford) in England. The church records would record deaths increasing from 5 a week to 10 a week to 20 a week and then suddenly a jump to 100s per week. This is clearly bubonic forms killing people by sepsis until one particular strong individual hung on long enough for it to reach his or her lungs. Then a single cough could infect 50 in a hall/dorm at some hospital. Yes, hospitals, so docs did not have to walk house to house. They had no idea about carrying infections house to house in those days.
Entire villages were wiped out. Records just stopped being kept. They were all dead.
Governments were wiped out, particularly in China.
In years to follow, the Plague deathcount kept increasing because the farmers had died. The were around hay and crops and so were the rats. There was no food.
If you look at a long term chart of human population there is only one place on the curves where there was a period of decline. Not for wars. Not for famines. The plague years. Human population actually shows a recorded decline — and note that happened even with total exclusion of the human civilizations in Central and South America.
Europe’s population was flat for decades. It could not grow. No food. Only when Columbus in 1492 brought back potatos to Europe did the food supply grow sharply and fund population gain.
That was 150 years of stagnation.