Read the excerpt from the time traveler's guide to elizabethan england. serious though influenza and malaria are, they are not the biggest killers of the age. that title belongs to the plague or "pestilence.” no one knows precisely how many die over the course of the reign but the total is probably around 250,000. in 1565 the people of bristol count up the plague victims for that year and arrive at the figure of 2,070, almost 20 percent of the population. ten years later, after another deadly outbreak, they record a further 2,000 fatalities. what is the central idea of this paragraph? another name for the plague in the 1500s was “the pestilence.” in 1565 almost 20 percent of the population died of the plague. the plague was the most deadly disease of the elizabethan era. malaria and influenza killed almost as many people as the plague.