Datawatch: Earthquake death toll in Turkey and Syria reaches historic proportions

This week’s earthquakes in Syria and Turkey are the deadliest in either country since 1939, according to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters.

According to the latest estimates, at least 25,000 people died in the disaster, and the number is rising.

Improvements in early detection, infrastructure and emergency systems have reduced the total number of deaths from natural disasters over the past century, despite the growing world population.

But earthquake deaths are among the most difficult to prevent and many of the most vulnerable populations live in low-income countries. Over the past 50 years, earthquakes in China, Haiti and Indonesia have each killed more than 200,000 people.

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The deadliest earthquake ever recorded occurred in Shaanxi, China in 1556. An estimated 830,000 people died. That’s more than double the number in the world’s second-deadliest earthquake in Haiti in 2010, which killed 316,000 people, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Amy Borett

Our other charts of the week. . .

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According to a working paper from the US National Bureau of Economic Research, workers around the world saved an average of 72 minutes of commute time per day by working from home in 2021 and 2022.

Employees in Asia – particularly in China, Japan, India, Singapore and South Korea – saved the most time. At the other end of the scale, workers in Serbia, Poland and the US saved nearly 20 minutes less than the global average.

How did Asian workers use their saved time? more work. About half was used for full-time or part-time jobs, apart from Japan, where people spent a greater proportion of their time in leisure.

Shotaro Tani

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Lockdown restrictions and social distancing measures have worsened women’s maternity care experiences during the pandemic, according to the latest results of the UK’s Care Quality Commission Maternity Survey.

Patient dissatisfaction with staff availability and communication remains above pre-pandemic levels.

The findings will fuel medical professionals’ concerns about the state of NHS maternity care in England. The industry is struggling with a national and global shortage of midwives. More than a third of its services are rated as “unsatisfactory” or “needs improvement”.up from 31 percent a year ago.

Ella Hollowood

Russia had the best-performing currency of 2022 on a real effective exchange rate (REER) basis – a measure of the currency’s strength against those of trading partners when adjusted for inflation.

The ruble rose 25 percent year-on-year, helped by capital controls imposed by Russia’s central bank after Moscow was hit by international sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine.

An increase in a country’s REER means that its imports become cheaper but its exports become more expensive.

In contrast, Japan’s REER hit a 50-year low as the country maintained loose monetary policy while other central banks began raising interest rates.

Shotaro Tani

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According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, almost 17,000 animal species are classified as threatened, more than twice as many as in 2007.

Some species are more endangered than others. The number of mammalian species classified as endangered has increased 22 percent since 1998, but the numbers of endangered amphibians and reptiles have increased by 2,000 percent and 628 percent, respectively, over the same period.

Because they tend to concentrate in rainforest regions and are therefore threatened by deforestation.

Federica Cocco

Welcome to Datawatch – regular readers of the Financial Times print edition may recognize you by your weekday home on the front page. Datawatch presents statistical insights that have caught the attention of our data journalists – everywhere and on every topic.

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