Mike, I'm sorry. I know you like to slice and dice every concept that hits your desk until one can read 6-font type through it. But, in the face of environmental catastrophe, you've got problems with the difficulties of counting up the victims, EXACTLY?? In the moment??
You think the public would be happier with the media saying, "Gosh folks, but we have absolutely NO idea how many folks are in the middle of this god-awful situation."
I think the point is that 100 dead, 100 missing sounds like 200 dead, but they just haven't found all of the bodies yet. Which is very different from 100 dead, 10 missing and presumed dead, and 90 unaccounted for but not known to be in the area.
It might seem pedantic, but when I saw 1000 people missing after the Hawaii fires, it sounded apocalyptic. When it turned out that the death toll was 10% of that, it was good news, even if 100 deaths is still too many.
When something massive and catastrophic happens, nobody knows much of anything. For either the public, or the media itself, to expect anything like precise numbers is just irrational. Perhaps there are reference sources available that indicate how many folks live, or were present in the area? Which might be as good as can be done, but then your criticism comes into play - the number will be much larger than the final, which comes days, weeks or months later.
Is there an iron-clad reason for why the general public "deserves" to have such accurate data, anyway? Having been trained in Mass Casualty Incidents, I'd much prefer to feed the best data available to the first responders on the ground, rather than worrying about the "accuracy" of the numbers given to the media.
One of the most important tasks in search and rescue is finding the impacted people. Ya can't stabilize and/or treat someone that isn't found. So, questions like, "How many people lived in this building?" become critical. And even then, that number will likely be bigger than the final count. For SAR, there are a lot of micro problems.
Re: Animal testing. That 90 % of drugs tested on animals tells you nothing about the superiority or inferiority of NAMS without knowing how many drugs fail with NAMS testing. It likely tells you nothing other than 90 % of candidate drugs won’t be approved. I guess the reasoning could be that if 90 % of these things are going to fail might as well not hurt animals.
Mike, I'm sorry. I know you like to slice and dice every concept that hits your desk until one can read 6-font type through it. But, in the face of environmental catastrophe, you've got problems with the difficulties of counting up the victims, EXACTLY?? In the moment??
You think the public would be happier with the media saying, "Gosh folks, but we have absolutely NO idea how many folks are in the middle of this god-awful situation."
I think the point is that 100 dead, 100 missing sounds like 200 dead, but they just haven't found all of the bodies yet. Which is very different from 100 dead, 10 missing and presumed dead, and 90 unaccounted for but not known to be in the area.
It might seem pedantic, but when I saw 1000 people missing after the Hawaii fires, it sounded apocalyptic. When it turned out that the death toll was 10% of that, it was good news, even if 100 deaths is still too many.
When something massive and catastrophic happens, nobody knows much of anything. For either the public, or the media itself, to expect anything like precise numbers is just irrational. Perhaps there are reference sources available that indicate how many folks live, or were present in the area? Which might be as good as can be done, but then your criticism comes into play - the number will be much larger than the final, which comes days, weeks or months later.
Is there an iron-clad reason for why the general public "deserves" to have such accurate data, anyway? Having been trained in Mass Casualty Incidents, I'd much prefer to feed the best data available to the first responders on the ground, rather than worrying about the "accuracy" of the numbers given to the media.
One of the most important tasks in search and rescue is finding the impacted people. Ya can't stabilize and/or treat someone that isn't found. So, questions like, "How many people lived in this building?" become critical. And even then, that number will likely be bigger than the final count. For SAR, there are a lot of micro problems.
Re: Animal testing. That 90 % of drugs tested on animals tells you nothing about the superiority or inferiority of NAMS without knowing how many drugs fail with NAMS testing. It likely tells you nothing other than 90 % of candidate drugs won’t be approved. I guess the reasoning could be that if 90 % of these things are going to fail might as well not hurt animals.