Table 1.
GDACS indicators and operational definitions used in this study.
Table 2.
Descriptive characteristics of representative (composite) earthquake events (2020–2024).
Fig 1.
Association between GDACS composite score and reported earthquake-related deaths (2020–2024).
The x-axis shows the GDACS continuous composite score (range 0–10; higher values indicate greater combined hazard and population exposure). The y-axis shows reported earthquake-related deaths on a log₁₀ scale, plotted as log₁₀(deaths + 1) to display events with zero deaths. Each marker represents one composite earthquake event (N = 85); orange circles indicate Orange alerts (n = 68) and blue crosses indicate Red alerts (n = 17). The solid line shows a locally weighted scatterplot smoother (LOWESS, span = 0.3) with a 95% bootstrap confidence band (B = 2000). Spearman’s rank correlation between the GDACS score and deaths was ρ = 0.520 (p = 3.43 × 10 ⁻ ⁷; q = 6.87 × 10 ⁻ ⁷). All statistical inference used raw (untransformed) death counts.
Fig 2.
Mortality by GDACS alert level with and without exposure normalization (composite earthquake events, 2020–2024).
Orange = 68 composite events, Red = 17. A. Event-level deaths. Boxplots show reported earthquake-related deaths by alert level. The y-axis uses a log₁₀(deaths + 1) transformation for visualization; all statistical inference used raw death counts. Mann–Whitney U (Red vs Orange) = 973, p = 6.36 × 10 ⁻ ⁶; Cliff’s Δ = 0.68 (large effect). B. Exposure-normalized mortality. Deaths per 100,000 exposed were computed as deaths/(GDACS-modeled population exposed within 100 km) × 100,000 and are shown only for composite events where GDACS explicitly reported exposure “within 100 km”. The resulting subset comprised n = 19 events (Red n = 1, Orange n = 18). Given the small sample and single Red event, this comparison is considered exploratory.
Table 3.
Logistic models predicting field-hospital deployment from GDACS score (composite events, 2020–2024).
Table 4.
Continent-stratified association between GDACS score and reported deaths.