What are you people basing this "200 or so" number on, when only a tiny percentage of the damaged area has been explored and no one can be sure how many people stayed behind in places like Plaquemines Parish?
Reuters, at least, reported "hundreds dead" in Biloxi. Bodies everywhere, according to others about Biloxi-Gulfport. There's no way to know anything about New Orleans yet but it isn't looking real good.
I was told by a friend with family that Bay St. Louis, MS alone will be many hundreds, there was rows of houses gone with no trace, and they were marking X's on the rubble where they found bodies, he said many hundreds, maybe thousands. usually a reliable source, could be embellished through the chain of communication. Pass Christian almost the same.
Exactly right. Eighty percent of the people in New Orleans got out before the storm. With a population of around a half million, that leaves 100,000 left in the city. If there are 30,000 people in the Superdome, that leaves 70,000 on rooftops or floating in the streets. If half of them survive, 35,000 don't. If 90% of the people left behind survive, that means 7,000 of them don't. And that assumes everyone in the Superdome survive.