  Cirillo and Taleb [Nature Phys. 16, 606-613 (2020)] study the size of major
epidemics in human history in terms of the number of fatalities. Using the
figures from 72 epidemics, from the plague of Athens (429 BC) to the COVID-19
(2019-2020), they claim that the resulting fatality distribution is ``extremely
fat-tailed'', i.e., asymptotically a power law. This has important consequences
for risk, as the mean value of the fatality distribution becomes infinite.
Reanalyzing the same data, we find that, although the data may be compatible
with a power-law tail, these results are not conclusive, and other
distributions, not fat-tailed, could explain the data equally well. Simulation
of a log-normally distributed random variable provides synthetic data whose
statistics are undistinguishable from the statistics of the empirical data.
