Hurricane MariaHurricane Maria killed 4,600, not only 64, as official U.S. government figures claim
Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico last September led to the death of thousands on the island, according to a new study – in sharp contrast with the official U.S. government death toll of 64. A new study concludes that as many as 4,600 “excess deaths” occurred in the aftermath of the storm as a result of failures of medical and other critical infrastructure, and described the official number as “a substantial underestimate.”
Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico last September led to the death of thousands on the island, according to a new study – in sharp contrast with the official U.S. government death toll of 64.
The report in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes that as many as 4,600 “excess deaths” occurred in the aftermath of the storm as a result of failures of medical and other critical infrastructure, and described the official number as “a substantial underestimate.”
USA Today reports that the researchers said their fresh evaluation was probably an underestimate, too, owing to problems with communications that persist in the storm’s aftermath. In an enormous range of calculations, they said there is a 95 percent likelihood the death toll was somewhere between approximately 800 and 8,500 people.
Hurricane Maria became a category 5 hurricane just before reaching Puerto Rico, bringing devastating winds and catastrophic flooding to the Puerto Rico. In the aftermath of the storm, roads and electrical lines were slow to be restored, and much of the life on the island ground to a near halt.
The collapse of the island’s infrastructure was accompanied by severe shortages of food and lack of access to potable water in many areas. Governor Ricardo Roselló called the storm “the biggest catastrophe in modern history” for the island.
The cataclysmic nature of the storm notwithstanding, the U.S. government insisted that the death toll from the storm has remained at just 64. Experts note that the discrepancy between the two figures has largely to do with methodology. The government figure accounts for those whose deaths were confirmed by the Institute of Forensic Sciences as directly disaster-related. The new study used baseline mortality figures to calculate “excess deaths,” or loss of life that otherwise would not have occurred if the island had not been plunged into a prolonged humanitarian disaster. Researchers used random household surveys to ask residents about their experiences during the storm and in its aftermath.
The report follows a similar finding from the Center for Investigative Journalism in December, which found that the actual death toll on the island in the wake of the storm exceeded 1,000 people. That Center’s report found that as a result of the collapse of critical infrastructure, hundreds of vulnerable people died in hospitals and nursing homes from conditions such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, hypertension, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases.
— Read more in Nishant Kishore et al., “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria,” New England Journal of Medicine (29 May 2018) (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa1803972)
