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Death Toll from Haiti’s Earthquake in Perspective
February 19, 2010
This is a joint post with Owen McCarthy.
The January 12th earthquake in Haiti is the most lethal natural disaster of the past 20 years. On February 12th, the Associated Press reported that official Haitian government estimates of the dead had been revised upwards, now reaching 230,000 dead. Furthermore, the number could be much higher, since the government admits they have not yet been able to count all the bodies and they have excluded those buried by families or in private cemeteries. As the figure below shows, this new total surpasses the 225,000 dead in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and dwarfs the death tolls from recent earthquakes in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Sichuan, China.
A catastrophe’s death toll can also be measured in relation to the total population. The bars in the next chart show the deaths as percentages of the total populations of each relevant area. For the 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the largest death toll was in the Indonesian province of Aceh on the island of Sumatra, where three percent of the population died. The 80,000 deaths in the Pakistan earthquake represented .4 percent of the population Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. The Chinese and Burmese catastrophes killed fewer than one percent of the populations of the surrounding areas. In contrast, the Haitian earthquake killed 11.5 percent of the approximately two million people living in the immediate area of Port-au-Prince, which comes to 2.5% of the entire national population.
So in relative terms also, Haiti’s earthquake surpasses any of these natural disasters which have occurred in other countries.
Finally one can compare the mortality from the earthquake to the mortality from other causes of death which afflict Haiti or have swept the world. The largest cause of mortality in Haiti for the last decade has been the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 2007, the last year for which UNAIDS has published data, an estimated 7,500 people died of AIDS in Haiti. The earthquake killed 30 times that many Haitians in a few days.
Other notable worldwide epidemics have been the bubonic plague in 1350 and the 1918 influenza epidemic. The first killed somewhere between 30% and 60 % of the population of affected European countries and the second between 3% and 6% of the entire world population. Thus for Haiti as a whole, the earthquake has had a mortality impact comparable to the 1918 flu epidemic and for the most affected region around Port-au-Prince the impact is comparable in magnitude to that of the bubonic plague in a less affected country of Europe.
Students of the bubonic plague of 1350 believe that its longer term repercussions on society were profound, including a general loss of faith in religion, a loss of respect for hereditary authority in general and the state in particular, the empowerment of the middle class and increases in the ratios of capital and land to labor resulting in increased wages for the poorest. While parallels between that continent-spanning catastrophe and the much more focused event in Haiti are risky, it is not hard to believe that Haiti will be a very different place in ten years than it would have been without the earthquake. Let’s hope that it is a better place, not a worse one.
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7 Responses to “Death Toll from Haiti’s Earthquake in Perspective”
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February 20th, 2010 at 8:17 am
It is very sad,that so many people have died in the earthquake. It is natures fury, nobody can avoid it. We have to hope for the good.By all means haitians should be helped to get a new, better life.
February 27th, 2010 at 7:14 am
real its a dangerous disaster to those people,lets us pray for them that can recover emotionally and mentally also we have to support them materially
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:18 pm
The first response said, “nobody can avoid” these deaths because “It is natures fury.” I think the point we should get from these data is that the death rate in Haiti actually was much higher than would be explained by the natural events alone. Other places, with better building construction and better rescue services, had much lower mortality rates despite having roughly similar natural events. Haiti had to pay a higher price because of its poverty and related social problems.
Another point: The CGD statement says, “The largest cause of mortality in Haiti for the last decade has been the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 2007, the last year for which UNAIDS has published data, an estimated 7,500 people died of AIDS in Haiti.”
However, according to UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children report that came out in 2009, there were an estimated 19,000 deaths of children under five years of age in Haiti in 2008. The figures are similar for the preceding years. Thus the largest cause of mortality in Haiti for the last decade has been childhood, not HIV/AIDS.
Aloha, George Kent
March 11th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
the sale of hardship is so hard to understand my prayers are with the people and the meagre amount i am able to help
March 16th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
I problably shouldn’t even go here – please no attacks. I do not want to take anything away from the reality of Haiti. The numbers regarding deaths in Haiti caused by the quake do not mean anything and lack validity. The government officials were likely trying to make it look bigger than any other disaster. No one counted the bodies. They were too busy to do so. I’m not even going to try and guess how many people died as it would be just that, a guess based on no facts.
April 2nd, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Thank you! Owen McCarthy.
April 14th, 2010 at 2:22 am
This is just awful. Haitii is a poor country, and being devastated by this type of calamity will surely bring its government and people to its knees. If only they had better structures and funding from their government, the death toll would have been lower.