Cyclone Devastates Myanmar (Burma)

First reports of the tragedy in Myanmar indicated hundreds dead and thousands homeless. Here is an extract from early CNN news coverage:

'Residents in this sprawling river delta city hacked their way through downed trees and trudged through knee-deep swirling brown waters Monday as they tried to pick up the pieces of their lives after a deadly cyclone ravaged the southeast Asian country over the weekend.

The powerful storm hit hard on Saturday, May 3, but had been building offshore over the previous day. The tropical cyclone, packing winds of up to 150 miles (241 km) per hour, slammed into Myanmar over the weekend, killing as many as 350 people. "We believe hundreds of people are dead," said Khin Maung Win with the Democratic Voice of Burma -- a broadcast media group run by opposition expatriates. "The entire lower Burma is affected. In some areas, entire villages are wiped out."'

Sadly, this early reporting has been supplanted with estimates of 100,000 dead, and millions displaced and in need of food, shelter, and above all, clean water. Disease is now the primary concern, with cholera already taking hold.

The GCP prediction was made based on the early reports, and focused on May 3, using the full GCP day as the formal data set. The result is a modest deviation, with Chisquare 86485.089 on 86400 df, yielding a p-value of 0.418 and corresponding Z-score of 0.206.

The graphic display using the cumulative deviation of Chisquare shows a strong trend from early in the morning until about 1600, when it reverses to become an equally strong negative trend for the rest of the day.

Cyclone
Devastates Myanmar (Burma)

Because this event has continued and worsened, it seems useful to look at the data for the ensuing days. The following figure shows three days beginning with the 3rd of May. The negative trend continues. This is of course a post facto analysis (and, moreover, we know that the data are generally too noisy for reliable interpretation of individual event analyses) but one might say the picture is symbolically appropriate to the situation in Myanmar.

Cyclone
Devastates Myanmar (Burma)


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