Hurricane toll ‘70 times higher than Puerto Rico reported’
With sustained winds of up to 250km/h and flooding, there were many ways for Hurricane Maria to kill
Officials in Puerto Rico say that 64 people lost their lives after Hurricane Maria slammed into the island in September. A new report says that estimate is off — by about 4,600.
If the analysis is correct, it means that for every hurricane-related death that’s currently on the books, another 70 fatalities in the US territory have gone uncounted.
“Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria,” researchers concluded in a study published on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
This isn’t the first time people have questioned the official estimate of the number of deaths that ensued after the then-Category 4 hurricane made landfall on Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. The study authors noted that several “independent investigations” have put the true number “in excess of 1,000.”
‘Violation of human rights’
The new study adds to “the growing consensus that the deaths have been undercounted,” Santos said.
And not a moment too soon, said Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital city of San Juan.
“It took too long to understand the need for an appropriate response was NOT about politics but about saving lives,” Cruz said on Twitter. “These deaths and the negligence that contributed to them cannot be forgotten. This was, and continues to be, a violation of our human rights.”
With sustained winds of up to 250km/h and heavy rains that caused catastrophic flooding, there were many ways for Hurricane Maria to kill, explained the team led by Nishant Kishore of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.