Hurricane Dean’s death toll stands at 20:

No deaths have been reported in Mexico, even though the storm hit the Yucatan as a Category 5 behemoth with 165 mph winds and was still a powerful Category 2 hurricane when it arrived here. The death toll in the Caribbean, though, rose Wednesday to 20 with the discovery of seven bodies in Haiti, where 3,000 were killed during Tropical Storm Jeanne in 2004. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Dean was expected to dissipate over Mexico’s central mountains by early Thursday.

Meanwhile, the considerably less sexy weather story of the week — heavy rain in the Midwest and Great Plains states, some of it caused by the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin — is proving to be more deadly than the third-strongest hurricane ever to make landfall:

More than 1,000 people were flooded out of their homes Thursday after heavy rain that swamped communities across the Midwest sent Ohio’s rivers spilling over their banks, the governor said. The storm’s death toll also rose when three people were electrocuted by lightning at a bus stop.

“This is a major, major disaster,” Gov. Ted Strickland told CBS’s “The Early Show” Thursday. …

With the flooding and more storms moving through, the death toll across the Upper Midwest and from the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin that swept Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri over the past week also rose to at least 26.