[alexholehouse]

This is such a morbid topic that I've never acted on it, but I suspect that with historical news data you could figure out the growth rate laws which relate time since disaster occurred with number of reported casualties to build a predictive model which - given the inaccessibility and population density of region and the scale of a disaster - would fairly accurately predict the final number of dead.

The logic being that irrespective of final number of dead the 'effective death rate' (i.e. number of new reported casualties per day) is likely to be similar (conjecture).

Anyway - just writing this post makes me feel uncomfortable, hence why I've never done more than hypothesize.

[GCA10]

Actually, if you gathered all that data, your sample would split pretty quickly into

a) tightly controlled societies (some = totalitarian) where the government has a strong interest in keeping the official number low, and

b) open societies (some with a sensationalist media culture), where news outlets gain the most attention by quoting the "experts" with the highest initial counts.

I submit the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake in what was then the Soviet Union and is now Turkmenistan. Initial reports from Tass (the USSR news agency of the time) talked of a relatively modest 6,000 injuries and 600 children orphaned, without providing an actual death toll. More modern estimates say that 110,000 to 176,000 people died.

By contrast, Japan's earthquake/tsunami of 2011 produced estimates of as many as 18,000 deaths in the weeks immediately after the disaster. The official tally now stands at a lower 15,890.