Analysis: The death toll in Sri Lanka was wrong. This might be why.
By Siobhán O'Grady Siobhán O'Grady WorldViews reporter Email Bio Follow April 25 at 8:06 PM After a group of terrorists detonated explosives at hotels and churches in Sri Lanka on Sunday, the death toll from the attacks rose rapidly.
As first responders tend to victims in large-scale emergencies, forensic anthropologists and other specialists work alongside them to evaluate pieces of human remains. The anthropologists try to mitigate the risk of over-counting the dead, but mistakes can happen. And depending on the type of attack, the fragmentation of human remains can make both collection and counting even more complicated.
When a death toll jumps and then comes back down, Hefner said, it typically isn’t due to negligence. “I suspect that something like this would even overwhelm most local resources in the United States,” he said. “There are very few medical examiner systems that can handle an incident this big." But in a chaotic situation such as the aftermath of a terrorist attack, there may be different investigators adding up their own numbers without realizing they are duplicating their colleagues’ work. Duplication is even more common in scenarios when bones may have been broken into many pieces, Hefner said. “The proximity and the explosive type is going to dictate what kind of fragmentation you see,” he said.
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