Because people keep asking me ...
An epidemic is an outbreak of a disease in a population which does not usually suffer from it: different health organisations/ministeries/departments have specific definitions about the percentage of people that need to be affected for it to be an epidemic. (So this is about the number of people affected)
Pandemic is used to describe the outbreak of the same disease in more than one country (again there are various definitions but WHO's is good). (So this is about the number of countries affected.)
Neither of these terms evaluates the severity of the disease.
[N.B. These are simplified explanations!]
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