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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Count the bodies, they don’t know how many people have died but they can tell you how many they have found. Whence why the numbers keep getting updated, the language used is “so far”, they report the number of people who are missing and injured alongside the dead, etc.
1. Look at who is reported missing.
2. Look at which buildings collapsed who was likely to be there at the time of the incident.
3. Compare to similar incidents.
Then you report confirmed deaths and estimated deaths. Confirmed deaths are the ones you know, and none other. Estimated deaths is an estimate based on how many people are missing or lived/worked in collapsed buildings.
Then compare to similar incidents, if you know from experience that 30% of the people reported missing in such incidents end up being found alive later, you pretty much multiple (Number of Missing Persons) * (Number of people missing*(Probability that missing persons turn out to be dead/100)).
So if you got 3000 people missing and a 30% are likely to be reports made in error or people turning up later, you most likely have 2100 dead.
After a disaster, the usual thing to do is set up an office that coordinates the response.
One of the first things they do is set up a team to get a list of all the places where people might be hurt and send out rescue crews.
They get by radio or phone reports of people rescued, bodies recovered, hospital admissions, and calls about missing people. That team keeps an up-to-date list of all those people and can get tell how many have been found dead, hospitalized, or released without medical care. It’s very chaotic, there are delays in getting info, data coming in from many places, some people being double-counted, but the counts are the best that the can do at the time, and if the people are trained for it, they tend to be pretty good at bringing it all together.
I’d assume it has more to do with their cell phone/ internet activity vs. physical body count. Using cell phone heat maps and their network activity, while considering that a phone is almost always within arms length of its owner, and cross reference that with systemic data/ satellite images and that could be easily used to see possible fatalities.
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.
In general with these things you have to understand that the news cycle demands numbers. Whoever gives a number first will be quoted first. If no official entity provides estimates, it will fall to a less credible source to provide numbers. It’s best for the government or another credible source to provide estimates early on to just combat the silliness that will come of they don’t.
That being said you can get some shockingly accurate results with just some simple statistics. things like “number of building” * “size of buildings” * “people in a given amount of space inside building” * “survival rate” will get you a ballpark estimate with just some drone footage
It’s easy to figure out what areas were affected, and reasonably easy after that to figure out what the normal population of those areas is. You multiply that population by some general estimate of what proportion of people die in an incident such as this in an area like that… and then you get a (very rough, but reasonably accurate) estimate.
Keep in mind, when someone says, “18 thousand people died” they aren’t saying, “We counted up to 17, 999 and then one more body came in and we bumped it up to an even 18.”
They are making a very rough estimate. It could be anywhere in that ballpark, off by hundreds or even thousands more. It may be roughly accurate but it is not precise.
Not related directly you the question but the US Geological Survey has a tool called PAGER that immediately estimates the range of human fatalities and economic losses immediately with each earthquake. The tool uses location, depth, magnitude, population, and local building materials to estimate deaths and costs. It’s useful to get aid going quickly to an area that may have lost communications. It’s currently estimating 47% chance of 1k to 10k fatalities, and a 20% chance of 10k to 100k fatalities.
Turkey and Syria will need a lot of help, quickly.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000jllz/pager
I think Turkey counts only the confirmed deaths. Many of my relatives were in the earthquake area and they said %70 people at the town (its population was 45 thousand) were dead. Also a mayor said more than half of the buildings in the district destroyed.
Just by looking at the death rates in my family, 1/3 of all my relatives are either missing or dead. Yet government says only a few thousand people couldn’t be saved (this number is constantly increasing, which shows they are not guessing, just reporting confirmed deaths.).
Note: Siutation is really bad there. People are currently trying to survive without water/food/warmth etc. I would be very gladful if you can donate some to [AHBAP.](https://ahbap.org/disasters-turkey)
I think Turkey counts only the confirmed deaths. Many of my relatives were in the earthquake area and they said %70 people at the town (its population was 45 thousand) were dead. Also a mayor said more than half of the buildings in the district destroyed.
Just by looking at the death rates in my family, 1/3 of all my relatives are either missing or dead. Yet government says only a few thousand people couldn’t be saved (this number is constantly increasing, which shows they are not guessing, just reporting confirmed deaths.).
Note: Siutation is really bad there. People are currently trying to survive without water/food/warmth etc. I would be very gladful if you can donate some to [AHBAP.](https://ahbap.org/disasters-turkey)
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