Disaster medicine specialist Nelson Olim warned this Wednesday that the preliminary balance of casualties from the earthquakes that shook Turkey and Syria must still be well below the actual numbers.
“This will escalate on its own, we are still very much at the beginning,” the Portuguese doctor, who currently works for the World Health Organization (WHO), tells agency Lusa.
Accustomed to dealing with this kind of natural disaster, Nelson reminded Olim that “the number of deaths and injuries grows exponentially in the first few days” and emphasized that it is not difficult to believe in much higher numbers.
“When you hear that 6,000 buildings collapsed, remember that if there was one person in each building there would be 6,000 deaths, but if there were 10 people in each building, the number would be 60,000 deaths,” he stressed. .
With regard to the injured, the specialist indicated that in general “for every death there are at least three to four injured”.
“If you tell me ‘there are now 10,000 dead’, I can quickly imagine that there are at least 30,000 to 40,000 injured.” said Nelson Olim, adding that of these, a portion of about 10% to 15% will “probably have died within the first 24 hours”, but there are many others to consider.
The preliminary tally of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck southeastern Turkey and northern neighboring Syria on Monday — and which was followed by several aftershocks — surpassed 11,200 dead in the early afternoon this Wednesday.
According to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country already has 8,574 dead, while in Syria, which has been at war for more than a decade, 2,662 bodies have been recovered from the rubble.
For Nelson Olim, the priority should now be on the group of people who need medical care, such as surgery, for the first seven days.
“We’re talking about people with exposed fractures, head trauma, injuries that aren’t immediately fatal but need attention this week,” explained, indicating that “at this stage” this group should consist of at least 15,000 people.
The strategy to be adopted – and already underway – “is to get resources from outside the affected areas to set up field hospitals that can care for people”, while the “plan B” is to move the injured to areas which is still intact and where there is still some capacity to act, the specialist defended.
A strategy that should develop very differently in Turkey and Syria, as recognized by Nelson Olim.
“Turkey has a huge capacity to mobilize resources, [mas] the situation in Syria is more complicated, with very difficult access, and I’m not really talking about physical access, but access on a political level,” he said.
Therefore, he thought, “there will be areas in Syria where the tragedy will be much greater than that in Turkey, and it will not be reported and probably will not have the media stage that Turkey has at the moment”.
The specialist also warns that an episode like the one in Turkey and Syria is “signs for life” and constitutes “a trauma” both for the victims and for those conducting search and rescue operations on the ground.
“For example, many people will be afraid to sleep within four walls,” said Nelson Olim, referring to the feeling that these people could collapse the building they live in.
In addition to this fear, according to the expert, another characteristic of this type of disaster will characterize everyone.
“Probably the smell of corpses will intensify from today or tomorrow,” warned Nelson Olim, warning that “it is an extremely traumatic experience” to walk past a collapsed building and “smell the smell of corpses inside.”
Source: DN
