About the tsunami

A few questions keep popping up in the ongoing coverage about the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami. Here's an attempt to clear them up:

• How reliable are the death toll estimates? It depends. As the New York Times explains, accurate death tolls are impossible for many reasons: census counts in rural and slum areas are often unreliable, existing records may have been destroyed, and some devastated areas lack functioning governments. Also, counting the dead may not a priority for responders on the ground, such as rescuers and relief workers.

  Plus, procedures for tallying the dead vary considerably across the region, the Associated Press notes. Indian bureaucrats meticulously photograph and catalog each body while Indonesian officials make guesstimates based on how many corpses fit into the average mass grave. Which brings us to the next question ...

• Do all those dead bodies really pose a health risk? No, the experts say. Poynter Online's Al Tomkins wrote a great overview on the topic. Slate addressed the issue, with decidedly more gruesome detail, back in 1999.

• Were there no measures in place to mitigate the tidal waves? There's been a lot of press about the need for a high-tech tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean but, as AP notes, some areas were spared because of very low-tech defenses set up against ocean-borne disasters.

• Was the devastation as total as it sounds? Apparently not everywhere, as this jarring photo of a busy nightclub on Phuket suggests.