I just cannnot wrap my mind around that number, Match.
As soon as the first pics trickled in, I knew this was terrible. Even before landfall I was telling people we were going to see things we only saw from the tsunami zone last year.
I am going to pray that number is off, it just doesn't make sense to me that we would have had that many people still in the city. The water also did come up pretty slowly in most of NO proper. That said, those who were left behind were probably mostly elderly/sick/poor. They might not have had a chance to get out alive.
I think numbers that high are too speculative at this point, but I do not rule them out. 10-20k seems highly possible, and even more is certainly not out of the question. 100k+... I don't even want to think about that, I can't really comprehend how bad it already is.