How do they get the counts of people killed by the tsunami?

Factual Questions
1

The counts are going up by leaps and bounds, and it all just seems way too soon to me for them to be able to figure this out.

Is it all total guesses? Or is there some factual basis to the estimates? Does anyone know how these estimates get made?

I’m not trying to belittle the tragedy, I’m just asking about the mechanics of the estimates. The problem is, I can’t see any downside for them if they inflate the numbers–there is going to be a lot of rebuilding to do, and, how does one put it gently, buildings are not as likely to gather donations. So I am a little suspicious, I admit.

2

I have wondered this myself.

3

I’m under the assumption (from news reports on TV) that they have reporting centers set up in just about every community that is affected. They are trying desperately to track down relatives of survivors and relatives of the dead. I think they can assume that if a dead person is not claimed that the persons relatives are either dead or badly injured. Since they know about how many are injured (they are in the medical centers) they can extrapolate how many are actually dead. That coupled with the actual body count and then padded by maybe 10-20 percent for entire families that are missing would get you a pretty close number.
I have also heard that these are very tight communities and that the people all know who their nieghbors, relatives, etc. are and can deduce from reports of the survivors who is actually missing.
The numbers keep climbing because the news is traveling slowly over there since the communication infrastructures have been disabled and add to that the fact that it’s basically a third world area so the communication isn’t great to begin with.
Even if you think the numbers may be inflated now, wait till desease/starvation sets in. The numbers are expected to double.
I wouldn’t expect an accurate count for a couple of months yet.

4

Really? As far as I know, the actual death toll figures we are seeing are only confirmed deaths - individual bodies stacked in morgues. Many thousands more are still missing. Sometimes the toll suddenly jumps, as when, for instance, hotels are found to be full of bodies, or train with several hundred people inside was discovered etc. In the more remote islands, they’ve taken the population of the island and subtracted the number of people that they found when the rescue ships turned up.

Sure, some people could turn up unharmed, but it’s a lot less likely than, say, 9/11, where the initial death toll was thought to be 30,000+ and turned out to be less than one tenth of that. With this disaster, the initial reports talked of 5 thousand or so, and it’s looking like at least 20 times that. In fact, by the time you factor in disease, I wouldn’t be surprised if the toll reaches a quarter of a million (IMHO).

So, I don’t think “suspicion” is an appropriate response.

5

However, one is hearing about flyovers that tell of bodies on the beach–this is not what one could call a well-controlled event in the sense that all wounded are being cared for in medical centers, and the majority of the dead on land are in a place where they can potentially be identified.

Even Sept. 11, the counts were as high as 10,000 for several days, and then went down to about 3000, and then slowly climbed again. The high number was strictly due to estimates, and even in a big city, it took days and weeks for all the missing but alive to be accounted for.

I’m just saying that I think it is impossible to know how many people fled inland and haven’t yet returned, and how hard it would be to find people where all the communications are down.

Colophon wrote:

But how do you know this? What makes you believe this?

6

I’m thinking that a large percentage of the dead were probably washed out to sea and will never be seen again. Are they taking this into account, or do the death tolls reflect only remains recovered?

7

Here is a link that answers most of my question.

In short, mostly guesses, some probably close, many wildly off.

8

Some areas in Sri Lanka are reportedly inaccessable, so no counts are available there. In many areas, the waters receded to reveal chest-deep mud that the tsunami scoured from the sea floor and barfed on the land. Nobody knows how many more corpses are in the mud.