Now It Looks Like The White House May Have Overestimated Syrian Gas Deaths

[joshcryer]

48. Yeah, if the number was 1423, no one would've cared.

The reality is that they likely got the number from adding up various sources and getting rid of overlap. I added up the best I could from MSF, local non-MSF clinics, and the videos (France watched the videos and counted the bodies; ruling out duplicates), and came up with something around 1300, just by doing the math.

The fact is that so many people died at MSF indicates to me the event was far larger than anyone wants to imagine. Think about it this way, if 100 people wind up going to one hospital after a major incident, do you then assume that that hospital is the only hospital to take them in? No, in the case of large scale deadly events people wind up going to dozens of hospitals. And a lot of them die in the place of the event.

MSF had three hospitals / makeshift clinics total. An average of 100 died at each. Now imagine a large magnitude event. You're going to go where ever you can. Imagine each and every clinic getting 100. That's only 14 clinics to get this number. That's not counting those who weren't breathing and couldn't get to a clinic and had their Muslim burial rights done (24 hours).