UKMTO Counted 151 Ships in Hormuz Last Week, Lloyd’s Counted 45, a Tracker Counted One
Every published figure for traffic through the Strait of Hormuz this month measures something different, and none of the publishers is counting the same object. The gap between them is now larger than the movement they are trying to describe.
CNN, publishing on 14 August, reported UKMTO figures showing shipping traffic in the strait at 17 percent of the pre-conflict average over the previous seven days, with 151 ships moving in or out across that week. UKMTO has logged 56 reports of damage to vessels in the strait and nearby waters since the war began on 28 February, a tally CNN notes does not appear to include two attacks reported on Thursday 13 August. Sixteen of the eighteen projectile-strike incidents UKMTO has recorded since 6 July occurred on the southern Omani route, the temporary alternative corridor. On 13 August UKMTO reported a vessel sustaining minor damage in a drone attack, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company said two of its vessels were attacked while transiting the strait. No claim of responsibility appeared in the reporting retrieved. The US naval blockade of Iranian ports remains in force.
Lloyd’s List Intelligence, counting transits rather than movements in and out, put the figure at 45 for 3–9 August in its 12 August brief, down from 63 the previous week, against 33 for 13–19 July. At least 23 of last week’s transits were westbound, against 28 the week before. The brief records the pre-memorandum weekly average of non-Iranian ships entering the Gulf at 15, and notes non-Iranian inbound traffic running above that average for a second consecutive week. The series does not reconcile with itself: the 5 August brief counted 84 transits for 27 July–2 August, of which 52 were non-Iranian-linked, including at least ten product tankers and four shadow-fleet tankers that have shifted into compliant trades. The 63 and the 84 describe the same week.
At the far end sits straits.live, an automated public aggregator, which as of 15 August headlines the strait as closed on day 168 and states that one ship transited on 9 August against roughly 73 a day normally. The same page reports 545 vessel arrivals at Hormuz-area ports on both the Gulf and Gulf of Oman sides in the most recent 24 hours — a port-call count, not a transit count. The tracker’s own escalation composite is described as elevated and flat with Polymarket contracts the largest contributor, and it notes that its two composites diverge. It flags Iran’s claimed Oman-route agreement as unverified and single-sourced to TRT World, and Trump’s US-territory vow as unverified and sourced to Forbes. The Hill, three days ago, ran a headline putting traffic at six vessels; its counting basis was not retrieved.
Assessment: None of these publishers is lying and all four numbers can be simultaneously true, because a transit, an in-or-out movement and a port call are three different objects. That is precisely why the figures are useful to everyone except the reader: a blockade looks total at one vessel a day and porous at 151 a week, and both are available for citation without correction. Watch for the number that travels furthest — the closure headline and the six-vessel figure are the ones built for onward quotation, while the Lloyd’s series, the only one that segments Iranian from non-Iranian tonnage, cannot currently reconcile two of its own weeks. Ask what is counted before believing the trend.