Puerto Rico death toll raised to 2,975

SANJUAN: Puerto Rico’s governor raised the US territory’s official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975 on Tuesday after an independent study found that the number of people who succumbed in the desperate, sweltering aftermath had been severely undercounted.

The new estimate was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

“We never anticipated a scenario of zero communication, zero energy, zero highway access,” governor Ricardo Rossello told reporters. “I think the lesson is to anticipate the worst. ... Yes, I made mistakes. Yes, in hindsight, things could’ve been handled differently.”

He said he is creating a commission to study the hurricane response, and a registry of people vulnerable to the next hurricane, such as the elderly, the bedridden and kidney dialysis patients.

Rossello acknowledged Puerto Rico remains vulnerable to another major storm. He said the government has improved its communication systems and established a network to distribute food and medicine, but he noted there are still 60,000 homes without a proper roof and that the power grid is still unstable.

Tuesday’s finding is almost twice the government’s previous estimate, included in a recent report to Congress, that there were 1,427 more deaths than normal in the three months after the storm.

The George Washington researchers said the official count from the September 20 hurricane was low in part because doctors were not trained in how to classify deaths after a disaster.

The number of dead has political implications for the Trump administration, which was accused of responding half-heartedly to the disaster.