This is being reported by the Hindustan Times, the People's Daily, and the Times of India. The American press is either not reporting on this, or if they do, they seem to be reporting only the (lower) breakout of numbers from Louisiana.
The
Sydney Morning Herald puts it this way:
The death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed to 973 after Louisiana officials raised the number of confirmed fatalities in that state to 736.
There were 218 dead in Mississippi and 19 deaths total confirmed in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee from the August 29 storm.
Mississippi officials did not return calls for comment on the latest numbers in that state, which last updated its death toll late last week.
Note that in Mississippi, officials either do not have the resources, or they do not care to update regularly the number of hurricane dead. However, the New York Times was reporting on September 16th that:
In Harrison County, Miss., a list of missing people taken from the coroner's office, the Red Cross and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children numbered 1,132.
If any official accounting is ever undertaken of the dead and missing in Mississippi, we can expect the toll to rise substantially. The same NYT article says:
The Find Family National Call Center, intended primarily for families searching for those they fear are dead, received calls about 4,313 missing people as of Wednesday night. Of those, 642 were people whose families felt strongly that they were alive, and by Thursday night, more than 350 had been reunited with relatives using databases and Web sites, said Heather Murphy, a spokeswoman for the call center. The rest were of "unknown status," she said.
So we may be facing several thousand missing from Katrina.