"I wish I could say the number of deaths went down, but I think the reporting network was wiped out," Page said.

The Benetech report is only a reflection of available data -- not a projection, estimate or demographic study. But there is information in the actual dataset itself that points towards a higher -- and maybe even much higher -- number of dead. Ball says that the age of up to three-fourths of recorded victims is missing. Yet a heavy proportion of victims for which age could be determined were between 20 and 30 years old. Meanwhile, only 7.5 percent of the identified victims were female; all of the more than 2,500 dead reported by the Syrian government are men. The dataset tends heavily towards males of traditional fighting age. Either this means that a large percentage of the people killed in the Syria conflict are combatants, or that the current documentation actually under-counts the number of civilian dead.

The data hints at another reason to view Benetech's confirmed 60,000 deaths as a low if systematically established figure. A large share of the report's data come from organizations with some kind of formal connection to the Syrian opposition. Benetech only counted victims for whom they had a name, date and place of death, and the vast majority of deaths are confirmed through multiple sources. But opposition groups could be under-counting deaths in areas they can't access -- Page, for instance, noted that casualty reporting from the Deir Zur area is currently lacking compared to other parts of the country, despite evidence of shelling and heavy combat. The opposition might not have accurate data on the number of government forces killed over the course of the war, and they might even have incentives to deliberately under-count combatant casualties on both sides.

A spokesperson for the Free Syria Database, a human rights monitor whose work was consulted for the Benetech report, raises another reason to believe that available counts are low: "Since the start, many families bury their dead and don't mention the names because of fear that the family members will be targeted by the government," the group said in an email, adding that they "think the number of government force deaths are the most under-reported because it is in the interest of both sides to keep them reported as being low."

There are even reported deaths in the dataset that the Benetech report doesn't count at all. The 60,000 number doesn't include deaths if there is no corresponding name, date and location of death. Neither does the 60,000 number account for anecdotal reports: if a reported death lacks one of those pieces of information, or if a death is based only on a secondhand description of an event ("three people were killed in Homs on Wednesday," for example) it didn't make it in to the final total.