By Mead Over with Owen McCarthy, Cen­ter for Global Development

http://blogs.cgdev.org/globalhealth/2010/02/death-toll-from-haiti%E2%80%99s-earthquake-in-perspective.php

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.