What a Shame! The Portrait of an Unprecise "Olympic Host" -- Chinese
Quake Toll, 69,172, Is Just a Guess / NY Times

The New York Times

June 18, 2008

Chinese Quake Toll, 69,172, Is Just a Guess
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI ― For weeks after the devastating earthquake that struck
Sichuan Province last month, the public grew accustomed to a grim daily
ritual as the Chinese government provided precise daily updates on the
rising numbers of dead and missing.

In the past few days, the updates have all but stopped, frozen for now
with grim precision at the figure 69,172. Behind this seeming clarity,
however, lies a far messier reality.

Officials involved in the data collection quietly acknowledge that the
publicly available death toll is little more than a rough guess of the
number of people killed in the May 12 earthquake.

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:29:06 +0800, Micky Wong wrote
(in article <48591bba@newsgate.x-privat.org>):

Sadly the CCP has reverted to its bad habit of imprisoning journalists who
don't toe the Party Line.

--
Love, Jim
(I often delete parts of the previous post and I often remove excessive
crossposts.)

On Jun 18, 7:29 am, Micky Wong wrote:

" Update: The unofficial Katrina death toll has risen from 1,723 to
4,098 as of March 13, 2007. See my March 30, 2007 post, Katrina Death
Toll Passes 4,000 for details. A list of 1,195 people who were killed
in Hurricane Katrina is available on this website here."

I think I read somewhere later the Katrina death toll was over 10,000.

rst0wxyz wrote:

That's a reasonable probability if those who died from Katrina-related
causes such as diseases, infections and post-trauma are counted, as they
should be. Still, I'm wary of that word "unofficial."

Jim Walsh wrote:

Sad.