How do they know how many people died so soon after a major disaster?

Question

In Turkey and Syria now they’re saying 1,800 people died already. Is it as simple as counting the bodies and reporting that?

In: 6513

Answer 1

Hello!

I’m actually an expert in this field and the exact problem you’re talking about is extremely complicated, subjective, and highly political. For context, I’m a former search and rescue team leader and currently run a disaster response team.

Every country has its own process. In the US, the CDC literally counts the number of death certificates “related” to a disaster. That “related” is broken down into deaths that are directly or indirectly caused by the hazard. Someone trapped in a house that floods is a direct death while someone who dies from cardiac arrest in a rural area cut off from access to a hospital due to the same flood is an indirect death.

In the states, the presiding medical examiner or coroner is the person who gets to decide the scope of “related.” Notably, many coroners aren’t medical professionals, but instead are elected officials. That’s problematic.

But that process, the official process, takes days (if not weeks). Other countries use similar processes, though nobody I’ve worked with is any good at accounting for homeless, refugees, or undocumented persons.

The immediate count, as it were, is a guess. It’s a projection developed by trying to understand the total number of people exposed to the hazard compared to the number of people expected to survive, with some error. Everything you’re seeing from Syria and Turkey is guesswork. Informed guesswork, but guesswork all the same. We won’t have the official numbers for a week or two.

Most of what we’re seeing by way of “verified” numbers are coming from the rescue groups on the ground reporting how many bodies they’ve pulled from rubble. Again, as someone who’s done that work, it’s not an exact count, but a rough estimate reported back to the logistics folks. A very normal conversation is “do you need 10 or 100 body bags?” If I report back “better go with 100,” trust that someone somewhere is adding 100 to whatever the count is, regardless of what I actually find with the team.