Eight people died when the wall of a government rice warehouse collapsed on them in the central Philippines.  It happened as thousands of desperate survivors of the super typhoon stormed the warehouse to make off with more than 100,000 sacks of rice.

Philippines President Benigno Aquino has revised the expected death toll down to 2,500.  He said the earlier figure of 10,000 feared dead came from local officials and may have arisen from “emotional trauma” from being in the midst of calamity.  That hardship, compounded by dead bodies still lying in the streets, sometimes covered by tarps, sometimes not.

But President Aquino admitted that central government officials had yet made contact with at least 29 municipalities in the path of the typhoon.  And some aid workers also expressed skepticism at Aquino's dramatically lower death toll.

“Probably it will be higher because numbers are just coming in. Many of the areas we cannot access,” said Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross. 

She says there are 22,000 people reported missing, but how many of them have been located is anyone’s guess. 

“They report their relatives missing but they don't alert us when they are found,” she said.

The numbers are as confused as the situation on the ground.  International aid efforts are picking up, and relief supplies have begun pouring into Tacloban City, the hardest-hit urban area.  Debris still clogs not only roads out to the boondocks, but also airport runways.  If and when aid can arrive, it still takes a while to get through to the people who need it.

“There are hundreds of other towns and villages stretched over thousands of kilometers that were in the path of the typhoon and with which all communication has been cut,” according to Natasha Reyes, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in the Philippines.