To put things into context. 1.3 million people die and 50 million people are injured in car accidents every year.
Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.
Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.
In a disaster of this nature, supply lines are wiped out. Hospitals are gone. First responders, to the extent there are any, are overwhelmed. It's hard to get food. Sanitary systems, to the extent they existed in the first place, are gone. Communication systems are gone. This is all going to have incredible impact, even in a less-developed country. The disaster affects entire communities for several years at least. No car wreck has this sort of impact.
Side show?
Your community, your system, is able to absorb the deaths which happen within that community. People in your community die from old age, traffic accidents, disease and many other ways, but the wheels of the system keep spinning. In the case of the Philippines, the recent tsunamis and other large scale natural disasters, entire communities were obliterated. These systems have completely broken down. In Leyte, 10,000 people died, but the system which supported tens of thousands more living is broken.
The local economy for many of these people has been pushed back to the stone ages. The rich still have their bank accounts intact. They can jump on a plane and start over somewhere else. The poor don't have this option. There is no functioning system there to support the people who have to stay there. They have nothing to eat, no money for medicine, nowhere to live and they are completely dependent on a government with relatively little resources. Restoring this system will take months if not years. Many people will never fully recover. Future generations will get held back from what they could have been. There's not much of a safety net here.
ETA: And sure, the ripples of this shock won't go much further than the borders of the Philippines. But I think Fukishima might be a good counter to your "natural disasters as a side show" argument. We don't yet know how much this disaster will affect us. It could do serious long term damage to the ecosystem of the Pacific ocean. Could the world see mass cancer from eating fish in the Pacific ocean?
This is equivalent the population to small neighborhood all dying at once. In addition to destruction caused.
Regardless of the cause, large amounts of loss of human life in a single event are still considered significant. The reverberating effects throughout the neighboring communities are perhaps most noticeable. You are removing an entire node from a graph, rather than individual leaves.
In other words, the deaths in the Philippines are bad enough, but there are millions of people still alive and put into great distress as we speak. And it's not as if it's their fault (which was the argument brought up for Katrina as well...), it's not as if they can be safe if they move to Japan (as if there were either the funding or political will for that).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11...
The same is in this situation - while help is needed in restoring the communities and sheltering survivors; in the long run anyway those "common killers" should be a priority for the same Philippines communitities, not overly focusing on typhoon-safety.
And the 10 000 dead isn't the number that should be emphasised above others - the main pain in this disaster is the millions of wounded and displaced; I wouldn't be surprised if the death toll of these displacement consequences (malnutrition, disease, etc) is larger than from the initial impact.
If disaster taps on your neighborhood window, I suspect you would sing a different tune.
Because the people who died were poor, this accident adds net positive emotional entertainment value to the life of typical consumer.
Seriously, WFT?
Not to be cynical, but I imagine if they were rich celebrities it'd add even more dubious 'entertainment' value.
Fixed that for you.