Katrina Death Toll in LA Dropping Like a RockThis is
not entirely unexpected news, but the degree to which the number of deaths was exaggerated is quite startling.
Authorities raised Louisiana's death toll to 197 on Sunday, and recovery of corpses continued. Teams pulled an unspecified number of bodies from Memorial Medical Center, a 317-bed hospital in uptown New Orleans that closed more than a week ago after being surrounded by floodwaters. (boldface added)
Remember, that's for Louisiana as a whole, not just New Orleans. Yes, that number will continue to rise, but it's never going to be anywhere near 10,000 in NO by itself, quite obviously.
As I commented when
La Dowd got all hysterical about "As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify...", the fact is that dead bodies float, so more and more dead bodies were not going to be testifying to anything.
Mark Steyn has a
good take on this:
...as the New York Times put it: "Death Toll In New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared".
No truth in the rumour that early editions read "Than First Hoped".
