Today’s Oklahoma tornadoes are already catastrophic in terms of damage and loss of life. It’s important to keep in mind that information in events that devastate a wide area often takes substantial time to finalize. Based on the experience of the 2011 Joplin, MO tornado, which officially killed 158, it will take days to determine an approximate death toll and weeks if not months to finalize a death toll.  In the Joplin tornado, based on information from breakingnews.com, AnalysisWire finds:

• Just over half of the fatalities ultimately reported were reported in the first 12 hours (89 / 158).
• About three quarters of the fatalities ultimately reported were reported within two days after the tornado (122 / 158).
• Six days after the tornado, ninety percent of the fatalities ultimately reported were known (142 / 158).
• The precise final number of fatalities was not known within one week of the storm.  It took many weeks to finalize the number of fatalities.

Here’s the chart showing the changes in reported fatalities over time.  The tornado was reported during the 6 pm ET hour on May 22, 2011:

Source: BreakingNews.com

Methodology:

• All fatality numbers are from BreakingNews.com
• All times are Eastern
• Highest fatality number reported is used.  Lower totals are ignored if they are later superseded by higher totals.

Sources and times (as reported by breakingnews.com)