Less people ‘affected’ by quake than earlier reported, says disaster agency
AP FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines—As the death toll from Tuesday’s earthquake in Central Visayas reached 195 on Tuesday, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said it has reduced once more the number of people “affected” by the calamity.
From last week’s 3.5 million people affected, the number went down to 3 million over the weekend and to 2.9 million on Tuesday, the council said without providing an explanation for the downward revision of the figure.
A 2008 Public Health Guide in Emergencies by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Red Cross/Red Crescent said that while there is no “single measure of a disaster that could capture (its) full scope… a common measure is the number of people killed or affected.”
The NDRRMC said that 1,282 barangays in 52 municipalities in six Central Visayas provinces were affected by the earthquake.
Nearly 378,000 families were displaced and many of them were staying in 104 evacuation centers.
As of Tuesday, combined figures from the NDRRMC and Bohol police showed that 195 people had died in the Oct. 15 earthquake, which registered a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale.
Hard-hit Bohol counted 182 residents killed, after authorities received a belated report about five more killed on the very day the earthquake struck.
Senior Inspector Jacinto Mandal, police chief of Loon town, said that relatives of the five fatalities in Loon immediately brought the dead to Tagbilaran City and the towns of Maribojoc and Calape.
There are still 11 people missing in Bohol, the police said.
Apart from those who perished in Bohol, other other people were killed in Cebu and one in Siquijor.
The number of injured was placed at 605.
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