Because the government is counting only those bodies so far recovered from the ruins it has woefully underestimated the tragedy that has struck western Turkey, leaving international aid agencies ignorant of the extent of the disaster and the diseases that will follow. Last night the authorities in Istanbul said they expected another major earthquake within hours and urged the city's 12 million population to sleep on the streets.
Other governors in north-western Turkey did the same. But millions of people have been sleeping rough in public parks and motorway intersections ever since Tuesday, which may suggest the government is trying to forestall criticism of the mass homelessness.
It is after all easier to urge people to sleep on the grass than to devise plans to rehouse them. But a series of mild tremors did shake Istanbul. In Golcuk the official death toll still stands at only a few hundred, even though a massive tidal wave swamped many devastated homes in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The town's mayor believes that the real figure of dead for Golcuk alone is probably 10, In Yalova, on the Sea of Marmara, hundreds of people lie buried beneath whole apartment blocks and the fatalities there seem certain to reach Golcuk's probable figure.
Turkish geologists have already expressed astonishment at the government figure. If the worst suspicions prove to be true then Tuesday's catastrophe was even greater than Turkey's previous record earthquake, when 32, people died on 26 December in tremors that were measured as high as 7.
Although Tuesday's earthquake was initially calculated at 6. Bulent Ecevit, the Turkish Prime Minister, announced yesterday - over two days after the earthquake - that camps were to be opened for the hundreds of thousands of civilians camping out each night like a medieval army on the streets and public parks of Turkey's north-western cities. With midday temperatures of 30C and perhaps more than 30, bodies still unburied, the danger of cholera is all too evident.
