Ever since the Earthquake in Iran on December 26, 2003 I’ve become increasingly aware of natural disasters with high death tolls. Am I just more aware and informed now, or is this statistically normal for the population?
I just read about a Mayan landslide that took out a Mayan village of about 1200 because of Hurricane Stan, the same weekend as that huge quake in Pakistan/India/Afghanistan.
Erek
Higher than when? Death tolls in many areas would be expected to be higher during the past century than earlier simply because of the large increase in global population, especially in the Third World where housing is less adequate to stand up to disasters.
Say, higher than a decade prior, and higher than the decade before that I suppose. I’m not looking for any causes here, just to see how my perception is impacting my knowledge of the reality of the situation.
I’m wonder proportionally as well. It just seems like natural disasters have claimed nearly 200,000 lives in less than two years. That seems like a fairly significant percentage.
Ok, well that answers that.
Thanks
With the recent earthquake and landslides, are we still about average for death tolls this year?
For perspective: India has a population of a billion. The country has an annual death rate of around 9 per 1000. That’s 9 million people dead each year. A natural disaster would have a hard time making a dent in that number.