In Turkey and Syria now they’re saying 1,800 people died already. Is it as simple as counting the bodies and reporting that?
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Statistics based on who are living in an area. Most places take a head count every 5 or 10 years. Using that information they can easily estimate how many people are affected and how many died quickly. Then the numbers go up and down from there
Initially, it is qualified guessing. Thw world has a lot of experiece with this, unfortunately.
But it is hugely inaccurate to begin with. Since you posted the number has risen from 1800 to above 11000.
Send any money you can spare to well-reputed internationally operating help agencies, so they can send aid, food and medicine to Turkey and Syria.
They don’t, the number is just an estimate and will be corrected later on with ongoing rescue efforts.
Counting the bodies don’t always work, that’s the scary part. You don’t know recovered body fragments belong to how many people in a huge disaster, unless these parts are undisputable like heads, hearts and so on.
The initial count is always an estimation of how many went missing, with confirmed body parts forensically identified via examiniation or DNA tests, the death toll gets corrected.
Sometimes the missing person won’t be confirmed dead for months or even years, in which case a “presumed death” is announced by court for legal proceedings.
The numbers are estimates only, from anecdotal reporting. Numbers will vary wildly during the rescue and recovery period. I can think of reports of e.g. 100 dead in a disaster in the USA, with the number eventually changed to 80-ish once the nubmers have been confirmed, due to double counting or reporting from various sources.
They don’t. It’s an estimate base on current information. In situations like this it’s normally wrong sometimes by order of magnitude and will get updated as things clarify
It’s an estimate, and it may always be an estimate. The number could easily go up, or down, over time. We had a big flood here and at first they were saying there were 50 people dead or missing. When it was all said and done, there were 9 dead.
The first hours of the Fukushima earthquake (2011) news were reporting 17 death, because those were the ones they could count from a sports center falling over people there or something like.
They were reporting 17 deaths and the 8.9 or 9.0 Richter earthquake simultaneously making it obvious nobody in the news centre had a fucking clue what they were talking about as even in a country as prepared as Japan the death toll of such magnitude would had to be counted by the thousands at least.
You’re not dead until someone with a clipboard says yup this one is dead. So the count so far is only the ones someone officially counted.
In a disaster like this it could be as chaotic as someone walking down the street counting the bodies the rescuers have piled up.
This disaster will likely hit a 100 thousand. It hit early morning…look at the rows. Whole streets of collapsed buildings. Remember that beach front condo building in Florida that collapsed with over 100 lost. That was just one wing of the building and I’ll bet those apartments weren’t as stuffed with families as living quarters in Turkiye.
Models are used to estimate loss of life. Fractal scaling is one example – https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/natural-disasters/
I think in a lot of cases it’s about estimating how many people were in the area/building and subtracting the survivors to get an estimate.
Like if a building had 20 apartments, with 50 occupants; and if there were only 10 survivors accounted for you might say there were about 40 casualties.
And it would get refined over time as people checked in, or didn’t..
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