NEW ORLEANS State health officials say Hurricane Katrina's death toll in Louisiana climbed to 423 today, up from 279 yesterday.

The jump came as recovery workers turned more and more of their attention to gathering up and counting the corpses in a city all but emptied out of the living.

How high the death toll might go is unclear.

Mayor Ray Nagin said earlier this month that New Orleans could have 10-thousand dead. But a street-by-street sweep of the city last week yielded far fewer bodies than feared, and authorities said the toll could be well below the dire projections.

The Department of Health and Hospitals says the death count includes 342 bodies at the Federal Emergency Management Agency's morgue in Saint Gabriel, 39 in East Baton Rouge Parish, 27 in Jefferson Parish, six each in Iberia and Saint Tammany parishes and three in Saint Charles Parish.

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