Most people have bank accounts so you can look at the number of suddenly inactive bank accounts from people based in that area.
Cell phone accounts...how many people’s cell phone accounts are not being used or have gone inactive.
Social Security Checks...while they are deposited, the social security officials will definitely want to ascertain who in those regions aren’t alive anymore to spend the money that has been being deposited into suddenly inactive bank accounts. Also what can also be tracked are the amounts and the persons from whom social security withholdings from pay checks have suddenly stopped.
Fed and State and FICA medicare and SS withholdings that came from now dead but unknown and missing non retired persons who lived in that region can be known and the numbers of such tallied...
Utility bills...who isn’t paying their electric, gas or propane bills. Include water and sewer, for some areas if customers didn’t have their own wells or septic tanks.
Unlike the 1972 Agnes floods in that, especially with what occurred in the mountains of Va in 1972, the numbers and Identities of the dead in the 2024 floods can now be so precisely tracked and found out...certainly not in a few days but in some weeks and within a few months surely. People are so much more tied into the systems and the instantaneous databases that undergird our society!
The numbers of the dead and who they were, are probably mostly known already but there is no way the powers that be will release that info officially right now,,,till Biden skedaddles his office.
Yes it is probably in the thousands.
Smart people who know how to monitor the Cell phone traffic and patterns of subscriptions and dropped services gave us the first clues of how many people may have died in China in the first months of the Covid 19 virus. They can do the same for the Appalachian floods!
Dead or unemployed?