“Almost every time there is a highly politicized event, the numbers that are presented — I won’t beautify it by using the term ‘estimated’ — range fivefold between those who want to minimize and those who want to maximize,” says Richard Garfield, past professor at the school of public health at Columbia University.
Garfield, who is now a team leader in the disaster response unit at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has led field research on mortality estimates in conflict and disaster zones. Iraq, where the U.S. government released “stupid, crazy numbers,” was one.
In Haiti, Garfield’s crew researched cellphone position data in order to assess population movement post disaster and the implications of that in directing humanitarian aid.
From that work arose an indirect outcome: mortality numbers. “We tracked cellphones that were in use in Port-au-Prince in the seven days prior to the earthquake and then we were able to see which ones did and did not come back on line ever,” Garfield says.
“From that information . . . one could extrapolate from phones to population a kind of crude estimate on how many people died.”
Though “crude,” Garfield elaborates that this extrapolation had at least a basis in fact. “The government of Haiti had no methodology at all,” he says. “They just put numbers on a page.”
Garfield’s death toll estimate doesn’t square with any of the published media reports. Not even remotely. “Because we thought it would detract attention from the other uses of the cellphone information and would become a political matter instead of a humanitarian one, we just put it aside,” he says. Garfield’s number: an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 deaths.
Months later, in the fall of 2010, American anthropologist Timothy Schwartz led a team of researchers in assessing housing re-occupancy and rubble removal in the capital. Schwartz’s crew sampled clusters of 5,158 residences, calculating the percentage of residents that had returned to their homes by, logically, first determining by survey how many had died. Schwartz’s number: an estimated 46,190 to 84,961 deaths.
Schwartz’s report, prepared for USAID Haiti, was criticized for generalizing Port-au-Prince sampling data based on a population of two million to the quake-impacted total population of three million, but that hardly explains the enormous spread in the numbers.
“I wasn’t giving NGOs the results they were after,” Schwartz says via email. “I wasn’t playing the game.”
Without any scientific evidence to the contrary, Schwartz’s critics levelled a charge of being disrespectful to the dead, prompting the anthropologist to write on Open Salon: “I would turn it on its head and say I’m honoring the ancestors by not allowing opportunists to heap an extra 250,000 unverified souls in the grave with them.”Schwartz is the author of Travesty in Haiti, one of the best books I know about the island and its culture before the quake and cholera. I wrote a review of it and Jonathan Katz's The Big Truck that Went By for The Tyee early this year.
"Putting numbers on a page" is also what the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) may be doing. Certainly its inability to track cholera in all departments, or to explain day-to-day discrepancies in its statistics, puts its numbers in grave doubt. That in turn raises questions about PAHO and other NGOs, which use MSPP numbers in their appeals for funds.
So it's not just a matter of patronizing Those Poor Haitians for their incompetence, but of questioning the competence (and ethics) of the agencies supposedly helping Those Poor Haitians.