Official death tolls for Supertyphoon Yoland are hard to find, but the one I got the other day was five thousand eight hundred something (with "Official Missing" at 1,800, and I have no idea how that could be calculated in a country where all record keeping is so low tech and lackadasical). The highest two prior numbers I could find for the Philippines were recent history, also, and in the low five thousands. I bring this up only because of the earlier situation where a disaster management official used a number of "10,000 deaths expected", and President Aquino intervened, adamantly, with a lowball figure of "2,000 to no more than 2,500".
My problem with the Phlippine government is that I know that taxation of the wealthy elite would cause our "1%" to head there in a heartbeat, but for the fact that the current wealthy elite have allowed almost no crumbs to trickle down to anyone else. So, allowing the true nature of the situation to be publicized must be "managed" in order to ensure no backlash from the Ruling Class. They simply do not intend to, and will not pay anything for disater relief. Thus the motive for the government to try to stonewall the true extent of this historically massive disaster.
Take, for example, the fact that 90 plus per cent of the deaths resulted not from the world record winds, but, rather, from the ocean surge. With Yolanda, as with Sandy here last year, forecasters knew where the water was going to hit, and how much physical destruction was going to result. Here, however, the government still values people, and we invested in saving basically all of those at risk. In Yolanda, however, thousands and thousands of lives could have been saved if there had been any NATIONAL commitment to doing so. Any NATIONAL resources made available.
But, what the hell, the rich folks didn't want to pay, and the poor folks paid with their lives. Nothing new about that!