Sandy's centre of focus: does the coverage belittle all other natural disasters?

Photo courtesy of @ThomasKaplan

"Freeloaders engage," I read, "[New York Times] and [Wall Street Journal] drop their paywalls ahead of Hurricane Sandy."
"... The winds at maximum strength, the ocean whipped up into a storm..."
"... The biggest hurricane to strike... residents urged to stay away from windows..."
"Car alarms going off, flood water filling the streets."
If I hadn't read on, the scene being painted to me by the various members of the Twitterati could have been describing a natural disaster anywhere. The more I read however, the sooner I realised that people weren't treating and reacting to this like any "ordinary" natural disaster about to happen. No, this hurricane was about to hit New York, in the United States of America.
Since Sunday, I've been following Hurricane Sandy with more interest and fervour than, I must admit, the tsunami that hit Haiti at roughly the same time. Oh yeah, had you heard about that?
The beauty of having technology at your fingertips at the time of such a hideous occurrence is, of course, that you can follow it blow by blow, tweet by tweet, Photoshopped-pixel by pixel. 

Photo courtesy of Mashable

And I let my curiosity of the coverage Sandy was gathering engulf me the moment I read, "The New York Stock Exchange has announced it will close on Monday. This is the NYSE's first planned closure since 1985. It is not expected to reopen on Tuesday." Suddenly, this natural disaster was a first world problem.
I don't even remember where I read that sentence or if I'm paraphrasing it (most likely) but the message of it remains the same; Hurricane Sandy is a big deal, I processed, so big a deal that the President of the United States is cancelling his political tour of Florida literally days before he is going up for re-election. Even Mitt Romney stopped his tirade of hate against women who want free contraception for long enough to - well - talk about privatising the handling of natural disasters such as Sandy. Shit just got real.
But just as quickly as the hunger for more information on Frankenstorm struck me, a sheepish wave of guilt began to wash over me. I was sat in the comfort of my room gorging on biased coverage, photographs of the Statue of Liberty being taught the 'Gangnam Style' and tweets by people tweeting about why they couldn't tweet "any minute now" live from New York, while dozens of victims were rebuilding their lives in Jamaica and Haiti, which Sandy struck less thank a week ago.
Haiti's Civil Protection Office reported 52 deaths, and I had not read a single headline over the past week about it, yet before Hurricane Sandy had even touched the sides of the States, the country and the manpower and forward-thinking to protect its citizens was the only thing I could read about on the front page of everything.

This blogpost I read on Amnesty International's site sums up my feelings for those who have lost loved ones or indeed a huge chunk of their lives via the loss of their belongings in any one of the countries where Sandy has left her mark. While I can see how Hurricane Sandy quickly became a topic of sensationalism, I also don't 100 percent agree that it's wrong to be fascinated by the Christopher Nolan-esque image of an apocalyptic New York. Yes the 'Sandy Scoverage' is tasteless at times (see the London Evening Standard's 'Manhattan Submerged' story for further evidence) but should the world be stiff-upper-lipped about destruction because a country can afford to recover quicker?
The truth is nothing to do with how many column inches and tweets the United States gains over the Caribbean.  It's just that we've become too blasé about natural disasters and death. It's easy to let a sentence such as "Super Sandy claims 13 lives" glaze over you. It's much harder to actually stop and think about how many hundreds of lives that number of losses will ripple-effect.
I also think it's hugely admirable that Google are pulling together an alert system to help citizens and potential victims navigate their way towards evacuation points and services in an emergency. But I also see how the potential of an alert system such as this could help the millions of people in countries such as Kenya and Tanzania who now have mobile phones set up their business ventures and help drive their country's economic growth.
On another note, if the same number of people who have been tweeting about Hurricane Sandy were petweeting (petitioning via Twitter) about human trafficking, I'm pretty sure everyone in the world would know that human trafficking can happen literally on your doorstep and would want to do something about it.
So, like, not to be a killjoy or anything, but maybe now that I have your attention, take a couple of minutes a day, just like you have now, to find out about where else your attention might be needed.
Just a couple of minutes a day to re-focus your efforts and attention on an issue that matters to you,not necessarily a "charitable" venture even, might make you realise that life isn't all about death.

A woman from Leogane, Haiti makes her way home during the flooding. Photo courtesy of  The Australian.