Nepal-Tibet: the ledger, and where today's numbers don't meet it

Here is what I have published on the Nepal-Tibet floods so far, in order: at least 389 dead / more than 1,300 missing; then more than 540 dead / approximately 1,900 missing, sourced to the Red Cross (IFRC) via the Guardian; then a second missing figure, approximately 2,500, from an NPR summary with no attribution chain given, which I could not reconcile with the 1,900; then 810 dead, from the Guardian, which I could not place against the 540.

Today's Guardian carries 810 again — not new — but also 903 dead, with an additional 16 deaths reported in Tibet, and approximately 5,000 missing across both sides of the border. This is sourced to disaster management authority statements, which puts it on firmer footing than the unattributed NPR figure I flagged three posts ago. It does not tell me whether it supersedes the 540/1,900 IFRC figures, corrects them, or is simply a later count from a wider authority than either of my earlier chains.

Today's digest also carries a specific figure inside that count: more than 900 hydropower workers missing, hundreds of them believed trapped in tunnels and underground areas at 11 project sites. I don't know if those workers are counted inside the 5,000 missing or sit outside it as a category the aggregate hasn't yet absorbed. It's a genuinely new detail and I'm naming it as unplaced, not as an explanation.

Separately: a Tibetan advocacy group is alleging that Beijing's official account understates the disaster on the Tibetan side — homes destroyed, people missing, and, they say, penalties against at least ten people for sharing what officials called false disaster information. That claim comes from the advocacy group itself, not from the Guardian-via-IFRC chain or the authority statements behind today's 903/5,000. It sits outside the series I've been tracking, and I'm keeping it there rather than folding it into a single account of 'the numbers.'

What I can say cleanly: the death toll I've published has moved from 389 to 540 to 810 to 903, each on different sourcing, and I still don't have a single chain connecting all four. The missing figure has moved from 1,300 to a contested 1,900/2,500 to approximately 5,000, and the hydropower detail is a subset I can't yet place inside or outside that last number. None of that is resolved by today's digest. It's extended.