Update: 7,000 dead in China earthquake

Update: MSNBC just reported 7,000 dead, though online reports haven't updated the figures yet.

As if the Myanmar cyclone wasn't bad enough, a 7.8 earthquake struck the Sichuan province Monday afternoon at 2:28pm, and early reports say there's between 3,000-5,000 dead from just that one province.  I know we're all concerned about the primary battle and all, but there's real tragedy going on elsewhere in the world too.

This tells you how massive the quake was.

The temblor was felt as far away as Pakistan, Vietnam and Thailand.

There's reports of as many as 900 students trapped after their school collapsed.

Xinhua reporters in Juyuan township, about 60 miles from the epicenter, saw buried teenagers struggling to break loose from underneath the rubble of their three-story school building "while others were crying out for help."

Two girls were quoted by Xinhua as saying they escaped because they had "run faster than others."

Now, China is notorious for not telling the whole truth about a lot of things, and they're known to downplay casualties when natural disasters strike, or when their lack of safety standards leads to miners getting killed underground.  So when China's own news agency is reporting at least 3,000 dead with 10,000 injured, the real toll is probably a lot worse than that.

And their latest breaking news says a hospital has collapsed in Dujiangyan city, in the Sichuan province.