But this post is a look back at the whole year. I've looked at the MSPP numbers for the first of each month since January, and tried to track the month-over-month increases. Here's what I found:
January 1: 523,993 cases since Oct. 2010; 7,018 deaths
February 1: 528,024 cases (+4,031); 7,026 deaths (+8)
March 1: 530,953 cases (+2,929); 7,040 deaths (+14)
April 1: 532546 cases (+1,593); 7,093 deaths (+53)
May 1: 539,199 cases (+6,653); 7,125 deaths (+53)
June 1: 552,631 cases (+13,432); 7,235 deaths (+10)
August 1: 583,805 cases (+6,480); 7,492 deaths (+82)
October 1: 598,222 cases (+8,252); 7,558 deaths (+19)
November 1: 609,908 cases (+11,686); 7,648 (+90)
December 1: 625,154 cases (+15,246); 7,778 deaths (+30)
December 12: 628,798 cases (+4,146); 7,824 cases (+46)
Total increase in cases so far in 2012: 105,307.
Total increase in deaths so far in 2012: 806.
You can see some striking spikes that were not apparent in the sporadic, day-by-day tallies I've been providing. Cases soared in March, again in April, and almost quadrupled in May; then they almost doubled yet again in June, to almost a thousand a day. June also saw the most deaths, 175. None of these increases were reported by NGOs or the media, except in the most general terms.
November was also bad, perhaps the result of the passage of Tropical Storm Sandy. December seems on its way to around 8,000 cases and 85 or 90 deaths. Between January 1 and the end of November, Haiti had a monthly average of 9,196 cases and 69 deaths—roughly 2 every day of the year.
This is far less than the predictions of 200,000 or more cases that we heard last spring. But it is bad enough, and it makes OCHA's forecast of 100,000 cases in 2013 seem pretty likely, assuming that no serious improvements are made in Haiti's water and sanitation infrastructure.
