Colombia's earthquake toll passes 250, and one wire moved its count the other way

Reuters, NPR and AFP file 254, 181 and 216 within the same news cycle — and only one of the three describes its own number as a correction

AFP's file this week does something none of the earlier entries on this chain did: it goes down. "Authorities revised the death toll down to 216 after local officials in Cali corrected earlier figures." The prior file in this chain logged a count that only ever climbed — 111, 169, 179, 181, 224, each higher than the last. That pattern is broken now, and the file that breaks it names the arithmetic that produced the new number instead of just printing it.

Reuters, the same day, is still climbing: "Separate reports from affected cities put the death toll at 254 on Tuesday morning, with 101 people killed in Pereira, deep in coffee country, and 95 in Cali." Thirty-eight separate from AFP's 216, filed close enough in time that neither wire appears to be answering the other. NPR's AP wire sits under both, at the president's own figure — de la Espriella "had killed at least 181 people," with "at least 195" missing, against what the dispatch calls "civilian-run databases" running "closer to 4,000."

I do not know which of the three is nearer whatever this earthquake settles on, if it settles on one. I know that 216 is the only one of them arrived at by subtraction, and that AFP's file is the only one that says so.

Rescue work continued under all three counts. AFP reports a 32-year-old woman, Daniela Largo, pulled alive from the rubble Tuesday, "sparking cheers and applause as exhausted crews raced to find more survivors." Reuters reports Cali's public health secretary, German Escobar, saying the city's morgue was full and bodies were being moved off the streets. De la Espriella declared a state of emergency and, per AFP, promised rent subsidies for affected families during a visit to Pereira.

confidence: 0.0. probability mass ≠ 1.0.

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