Haitian death tolls (3)

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The Haitian earthquake was a week ago, and while secondary effects of the earthquake (civil unrest, impact of breakdown of infrastructure, etc.) are starting to make the news, the death toll numbers are still all over the place:

• Haiti death toll: Government says toll could be massive, but firm numbers elusive (Christian Science Monitor)
  
• Haiti appeals for aid; official fears 100,000 dead after earthquake (CNN)

The first article mentions the difficulty of getting accurate counts, and notes that while estimates are 50 000 and 100 000, the confirmed count is "in the hundreds" whatever that means. The second article mentions three estimates: 30 000, 50 000, and 100 000, with the two lower numbers coming from a United Nations official rather than Haitian officials.

The first article includes two examples of death tolls vs. their initial estimates, one from a somewhat similar disaster: the 2003 Bam, Iran earthquake. That earthquake was magnitude 6.6, had initial death toll estimates of 41 000, but was eventually revised down to 26 271 killed, 30 000 injured, 100 000 displaced due to high building collapse rates in the Bam metropolitan area. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was much larger, with something like a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and deaths in 14 countries, but most of the deaths were due to the tsunami, so it's hard to make a fair comparison here.

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Haitian death tolls (2)

It is really difficult to do science in difficult circumstances, and unfortunately the question of how many people, exactly, have died as a result of the 2010 Haitian earthquake is a scientific question. Here are a few links:

• Haiti Death Toll Ticking Up Every Moment
• Haiti death toll to reach tens of thousands, Hillary Clinton warns
• 100,000 feared dead in horrific Haiti quake
• Red Cross: 3M Haitians Affected by Quake
• Obama, Bush and Clinton launch Haiti aid appeal (Reuters)
  
• 2010 Haiti earthquake (Wikipedia)
  

The numbers are still kind of round, and vary from 50 000 to 220 000. At the risk of sounding cynical, I am tempted to be skeptical about any numbers coming from official government sources, and would be more inclined to believe numbers coming from a non-governmental organization with the capacity to collect numbers from many areas. The numbers in the article citing the Red Cross are really soft; it says three million affected, tens of thousands dead.

The 200 000 number seems to have come from a comparison to the 2004 South Asian Tsunami, but has otherwise been pulled out of thin air.

Haitian death tolls

Here are a few quick links regarding the death toll of the recent earthquake in Haiti:

• Kiwi missionary estimates death toll could be 1 million 
• Red Cross: Haiti death toll near 50K; aid begins arriving 
• Haiti death toll in thousands
• 2010 Haiti earthquake (Wikipedia)
  

The first number is a prediction of eventual total deaths; the second is an official estimate from the Red Cross (45-50 000), and the third includes an estimate from unnamed Haitian government officials of about 100 000; the Wikipedia article collects these latter two estimates, and it looks like both of them are current counts, not predictions.

I'm not going to take any cheap shots here; on the other hand, I'd suggest that estimating a large number when communication is poor and data incomplete is really hard.

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• Haiti devastation emerges (theworld.org)
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