Puerto Rico hurricane death toll revised from 64 to 4,645

HURRICANE Maria, which battered Puerto Rico in September 2017, is likely to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 4,600 people, some 70 times more than official estimates, US researchers said yesterday.

The government-provided death toll stands at 64, but experts say an accurate count was complicated by the power cuts and widespread devastation wreaked by the storm, which caused $90billion (£68billion) of damage and is ranked as the third costliest cyclone in the US since 1900.

Earlier independent investigations had put the death toll at closer to 1,000.

But the latest estimate, compiled by researchers at Harvard University, was far higher – at 4,645 deaths from the day of the storm, Sept 20, until Dec 31 2017. For comparison, the death toll from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina – the costliest hurricane in US history – was far lower, estimated at 1,833.

Most deaths after Maria hit Puerto Rico were blamed on interruptions in medical care due to power cuts and blocked or washed-out roads, said the report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Approximately a third of post-hurricane deaths were reported by household members as being caused by delayed or prevented access to medical care,” said the report.

Researchers went door-to-door at 3,299 homes randomly selected from across the US territory, home to some 3.3million people.

Survey-takers used criteria from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to determine if a person’s death could be blamed on the hurricane. By definition, this could be either forces related to the event such as flying debris, or unsafe or unhealthy conditions in the three months after, including loss of medical services.

The surveys were taken from January to February 2018, a time when, researchers noted, “many survey respondents were still without water and electricity”.

Even the 4,645 death toll is believed to be a “substantial underestimate” of the actual death count, said the report, noting it could be above 5,700. “On average, households went 84 days without electricity, 64 days without water, and 41 days without cell phone coverage,” the report added.