Haiti: Josh Shahryar's News LiveBlog (20/21 January)

0255 GMT

Another amazing story of survival and miracles from today in Haiti. CNN’s AC360 reports:

A five-year-old boy named Monley was found alive in the rubble of his home today. His mother was killed and his father is missing. Monley was taken to a hospital where doctors say he has no broken bones, but he is suffering from severe dehydration.

Haiti: Josh Shahryar's Humanitarian LiveBlog (20/21 January)

Anderson was at the hospital when Monley arrived this afternoon. He got details on the rescue from his family.

“The uncle was actually searching through the rubble, looking for the dead body of his brother, this boy’s father. The uncle, with four of his friends, not some international search and rescue team, pulled out the little boy,” Anderson reported earlier today.


0241 GMT

One of the biggest challenges in Haiti has been to figure out just how many people have perished in the aftermath of the apocalyptic earthquake. So far, the numbers are blurry. Reports of total number of victims range from as low as 50,000 to as high as more than 200,000.

The New York Times has a great article on the challenges facing the Haitian government and the international relief agencies in figuring out how many lives have been lost.

The simple truth is that no accurate figure exists. In disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, the toll habitually swings way up at first, taking a couple of weeks to settle at a final, accepted number.

In countries like the United States or China, with vast resources to handle and count the dead, the numbers are likely to be more accurate than in a poor nation like Haiti, experts said.

The fact that the earthquake, with a magnitude of 7, devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, virtually paralyzing a government that was hard-pressed to count the living in normal times, only compounded the problem.

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