4/23/13 10:00 AM UPDATE:  Now, there are 282 injuries.  Please see the updated post.

AnalysisWire undertook an extensive effort to scrutinize the April 15th Boston Marathon bombing news coverage. By using the Boston Globe’s live blog, we assessed how:

• Injury totals were reported over time
• Fatality totals were reported over time

We reached the following conclusions:

• By the end of April 15^th, only 77% of injuries were reflected in the total injury count.
• Assuming 183 is the final injury total, it took more than 25 hours to arrive  at this number
• The full fatality count took nearly 19 hours to report
• In the first two hours of coverage, no more than one-fifth of the total injuries were reported
• 2 fatalities were reported within roughly one hour of the incident

Reported injuries over time were as follows:

Reported fatalities over time were as follows:

Thus, it is important to keep in mind the futility of expecting full and complete information early on in a disaster-type situation. A full methodology is provided below:

Methodology

We went through the live blog at Boston.com of the event: http://live.boston.com/Event/Live_blog_Explosion_in_Copley_Square for all mentions of injury totals. We applied the following rules:

• If injury counts were lower than previously-reported injury counts, they were ignored
• If a range of injuries was given, the smaller number is charted
• The times of the original tweets on Twitter were used, not when they were posted to Boston.com
• Hospital-specific totals were not used to update totals
• Occasionally, we ran across other reports about injury counts from outside the Boston Globe (for example, tweets from the same individual that weren’t posted to the Boston.com live blog and a higher injury total from CNN).  For the sake of accuracy, we included these tweets and noted them below.
• We stopped our analysis at the end of April 16^th, as we hit the upper limit of injury totals reported.  183 is the maximum injury count we were able to find.

The details of each entry are below: