Reply #4: The problem is that so many of the dead will never be accounted

[Lucky Luciano]

for and it may very well be 400K dead. Who knows. Not to be callous and by being too mathematical about such a tragedy, but I think a good mathematical model to use for calculating the total dead might start with the following:

Consider the areas that were hit really hard like Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. I say a good method to do this would be to extrapolate based on the number of foreign tourists who remain missing or who have not reported in any way a month after the tragedy - I will presume they died in the tsunami. Using similar beaches (like Ko Samui in Thailand or other parts of Sri Lanka not hit) do a statistical sampling of the percentage of people within 100m of the beach, between 100m and 200m, etc that are foreigners - all the way back to wherever the tsunami inundated the area. From the sampling, calculate the percentage in each region that are foreigners. Also use the sampling to estimate the total number of people in each region. Then consider the number of bodies of foreigners that were actually retrieved. Add the missing foreigners list to the total number of foreign bodies found. Then comparing this with the sample we took of about how many foreigners would have been expected to be in the regions at the time of the tsunami, we can get a percentage of the number killed. Then extrapolating this to the total population in the area (assuming that foreigners and locals alike had the same percentage chance of surviving), we may get a feel for the total number that were actually killed. The reason I use the foreigners is because they will be better documented as to how many are actually missing. It would be much harder to do this with the locals. I also assume that they have taken pictures of every single corpse - and that foreigners may be identified over the course of the next year by relatives at home by this process to reduce the number of missing so that the body count does not double count with those that are missing. There are a lot of assumptions here of course, but this is the only way I can think of to get a fair estimate on the extent of the tragedy.

My method does not work well in Indonesia, since Aceh province was a highly restricted area where foreigners were not allowed. The percentages in those area that were killed will have to be scaled up because of the proximity to the earthquake and can only be guessed by the populations known to be in the regions and whatever scaling factors get used.

What a sad thing this is.