It was the authorities, not the media, who shipped in 25K body bags. Of course, the number of body bags isn't a reliable forecast of the number of dead; better to ask for too many than too few, because the unused ones can always be shipped back to the warehouse.
The high-end estimate of the dead, from what I've seen, was Nagin's 10,000. It reminds me of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when we were preparing for tens of thousands of victims before settiling on a (still-staggering) number just south of 3000 weeks later. In crisis mode, it takes a while to sort out that Jimmy Smith, Jimbo Smith and James Lee Smith are all the same person, not three people.
All that said, if the final toll doesn't reach four figures, that qualifies as a minor miracle. If half a million people flee chaos and fewer than a thousand die in it, while I don't want to diminish the tragedy of those hundreds of families, that's a pretty solid record.