# Will there be an accurated approximation of the death toll in Haiti?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [January 19, 2010, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597 "2010-01-19T19:10:12Z")
**Posts on this page:** 17
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@R.P.McMurphy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/R.P.McMurphy)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/1 "2010-01-19T19:10:12Z")
According to this article in the NY Times today, bodies are being buried in mass graves and no one is counting or even trying to identify the dead.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/world/americas/19grave.html?hp](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/world/americas/19grave.html?hp)
Will scientists and/or statisticians (or whoever) be able to come up with a reasonably accurate number of how many people were killed? What are the methods for making such estimates? How does the process work?
What happened with the tsunami tragedy? Were the bodies counted?
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### Author:  [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/2 "2010-01-19T19:16:08Z")
The Tsunami was a little different in that people could have been washed away or buried in mud. I would expect a fairly close accounting of the dead in Haiti.
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### Author:  [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/3 "2010-01-19T19:17:18Z")
I think it’s guaranteed that it will be the worst disaster in the modern America’s.
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### Author:  [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/4 "2010-01-19T19:26:41Z")
The number being bandied about is 200,000. I really doubt an accurate count can be established.
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### Author:  [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/5 "2010-01-19T19:27:12Z")
The problem becomes more complicated the less the population is documented. Of course, as much of that documentation could be buried in rubble, along with a lot of the people who knew where to find it, the problem gets worse.
Consider - an apartment building collapsed. Who was inside? The rental office would be the first clue. The rental office is probably under that rubble. The tenants probably paid cash - less paper trail again. They may not have signed rental agrements like in the USA. You would expect their place of work to report them missing, but their place of work is missing along with the paymaster. In a cash society, even the pay records - if still found - will be meaningless.
Perhaps the only way to count is using mass graves and estimates, added to as the cleanup progresses in the next year or two, and more bodis are found in the rubble.
It’s a sad mess.
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### Author:  [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/6 "2010-01-19T20:54:52Z")
The chance that it will be possible to show that the final “accepted” toll is reasonably accurate is very low - near zero, I’d say. There is no practical way to count the bodies being buried, and almost certainly no way after the fact to put a good number on those who are no longer around.
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### Author:  [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/7 "2010-01-19T21:13:08Z")
Well, you don’t need to actually put a name to everyone that died to get a decent count for the number of the dead. If you know a) the pre-disaster population, b) the post-disaster population and c) the number of recent emigrants (gonna assume there aren’t a lot of people immigrating _into_ Haiti), then the math is pretty obvious.
For a), the population number in wikipedia appears to be good to the nearest thousand, the other two numbers will probably be harder to get, but an accurate estimate to the nearest 10,000 hardly seems impossible.
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### Author:  [@Bijou\_Drains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bijou_Drains)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/8 "2010-01-19T21:46:17Z")
They don’t have a precise number for Katrina and that was around 1800 people confirmed killed. There were over 700 people considered missing from Katrina in 2006, the number may be lower now.
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### Author:  [@R.P.McMurphy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/R.P.McMurphy)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2010, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/9 "2010-01-19T23:24:59Z")
To elaborate on my OP, it seems that when catastrophes hit, the news reports a consistently progressing count of casualties. IIRC, with the tsunami, it was shocking how the casualty count quickly increased as though bodies were being counted. (Were they in fact being counted?)
In the case of Haiti, the news does not seem to be reporting an increasing body count. It’s as though bodies are like bricks and just have to be moved out of the way. It’s mind-numbing. We’ve heard numbers thrown out but they are all over the board. Will we ever get a number that is reasonably accurate? Are there population experts that know how to eventually arrive at fairly accurate figures in a situation such as this?
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### Author:  [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/10 "2010-01-20T03:17:43Z")
> [@Simplicio](#):
>
> If you know a) the pre-disaster population, b) the post-disaster population and c) the number of recent emigrants …
I doubt we’ll ever see accurate figures for any of these three. Obtaining them would require a level of official competence unusual in Haiti even before the quake.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/11 "2010-01-20T03:25:00Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#):
>
> They don’t have a precise number for Katrina and that was around 1800 people confirmed killed. There were over 700 people considered missing from Katrina in 2006, the number may be lower now.
That’s still true as far as I know. It’s a large country and there are a lot of places they could have gone. That’s not quite the case in Haiti, but between people who emigrate after the earthquake, people who die and are immediately buried by their families instead of being counted by the government, people without documentation, and so on, I’m sure there will be officially missing people who are never found. This is a huge disaster and I don’t know how advanced the record keeping was, and how much might have survived.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/12 "2010-01-20T03:36:13Z")
> [@Magiver](#):
>
> The Tsunami was a little different in that people could have been washed away or buried in mud. I would expect a fairly close accounting of the dead in Haiti.
I’d say the opposite, according to the article in the OP.
> [@](#):
>
> After the 2004 tsunami in Asia, aid groups and governments established a system in which people were photographed before being buried so loved ones could search for them. Here, all the dead are anonymous.
As for accurate numbers before the quake, news reports keep mentioning a half million people living in illegal shantytowns on the mountainside that are now gone. Try to determine the proper number of illegals in this country. Estimates are wildly different. Illegal anybody try to keep away from counts, assuming the Haitian government ever took them. Nobody knew the population before. People are fleeing the city for the countryside. Who knows when or if they’ll return? How would anyone be able to give before or after numbers?
Any numbers given will be estimates, approximations, extrapolations, and plain guesses.
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### Author:  [@R.P.McMurphy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/R.P.McMurphy)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/13 "2010-01-20T03:43:41Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#):
>
> Any numbers given will be estimates, approximations, extrapolations, and plain guesses.
That’s what I’m thinking and wondering. Will historians agree on an a rather arbitrary number and stick with it? Is that how it works?
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### Author:  [@drhess](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drhess)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/14 "2010-01-20T03:45:32Z")
Can mass graves be studied without disturbing them? The burning of bodies presents a problem, but I hope that has been stopped. But are there technologies that allow you to “see” how many bodies are in a grave site? I assume it will not be hard to identify the sites as people will not have a reason to avoid identifying them.
[Sorry for the typos, but I’m celebrating with some vodka the news of a dear friend just found in Haiti. Yeah!] 🙂
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### Author:  [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/15 "2010-01-20T03:48:50Z")
They always exaggerate the numbers at the beginning of the news cycle.
I recall after 9/11 they were saying 8,000 or more dead. Then a few days later it was 6,000. The final number was 2,973 victims according to wikipedia.
The news guys love to sensationalize any tragedy.
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### Author:  [@Bijou\_Drains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bijou_Drains)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/16 "2010-01-20T03:56:00Z")
Very early on they said 50k died on 9/11 since they assumed nobody got out before the buildings collapsed.
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### Author:  [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2010, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-there-be-an-accurated-approximation-of-the-death-toll-in-haiti/525597/17 "2010-01-20T18:00:37Z")
The very first report of the tsunami that I heard said 9.0 on the Richter scale and 20,000 dead in Indonesia. I said out loud that it was an waful small number for what was the largest earthquake by far in modern times. The final estimate was half a million IIRC.
Here, the numbers tossed about range from 50,000 to 200,000 or more. that’s a pretty wide range, and once all the bodies ar buried, perhaps we’ll get it closer to the nearest 10,000. It’s scary to think an earthquake can kill almost half as many people in one small area as another did all over the Indian Ocean.
Afterwards, the government can start tallying; a hole this big, filled - according to witnesses - with this many bodies would imply a count of this many casualties. Start collecting all these numbers for various gravesites, and you can get a pretty good estimate what the toll should be. This presumes a level of organization and determination that for now the Haitian government does not seem to have.