Report: Hurricane Maria claimed 1,139 lives in Puerto Rico over 3 months

residents who drowned in flooded streets or who were crushed in collapsing buildings. Other fatalities occurred days or weeks later as patients were forced to go without necessary medications, lost access to equipment such as dialysis machines or were unable to call for an ambulance following an otherwise treatable emergency as Puerto Rico struggled to recover from the storm.

For the new study in JAMA, demographer Alexis Santos-lozada of Pennsylvania State University and researcher Jeffrey Howard of the University of Texas at San Antonio examined official death counts for Puerto Rico between January 2010 and December 2017.

First, the pair focused on the seven years before the hurricane hit to determine the baseline number of deaths for each month of the year. They averaged the figures from 2010 to 2016 and came up with a range that had a 95 percent chance of including the true mortality number.

Then, for each month, they compared that range to the number of deaths in 2017.

For all of the months between Hundreds of San Juan residents take shelter at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in September until Hurricane Maria passed.

January and August, the 2017 death count was in line with the averages from the previous seven years. In four months (January, April, May and June) the 2017 figure was slightly above average, and in four months (February, March, July and August) it was slightly below. But in all those cases, the 2017 count was within the historical range.

That changed in September, when Hurricane Maria made landfall.

Between 2010 and 2016, the number of September deaths in Puerto Rico was between 2,297 and 2,469. In 2017, it was 2,928, according

to the vital statistics system.

To be conservative, Santos-lozada and Howard compared the 2017 figure to the highest number in the range from previous years. That gave them an estimate of 459 “excess deaths” in the month the hurricane hit.

Using the same method, they estimated there were 564 additional deaths in October and 116 in November. But by December, the 2017 death count (2,820) was back in the historical range (2,543 to 2,824).

Altogether, the excess deaths from September through November totaled 1,139.

One of Japan’s top medical universities has been systematically blocking female applicants from entering the school for at least eight years, local news agencies reported on Thursday.

Tokyo Medical University, a private institution consistently ranked among the country’s best for clinical medicine, has been automatically lowering the entrance exam results of female applicants for the past decade, an attempt to keep the ratio of women in each class of students below 30 percent, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. A specific coefficient was reportedly applied to the scores of all female applicants, lowering them by 10 to 20 percent.

Details about the tampering were leaked amid an investigation into top administrators at Tokyo Medical University, who came under fire in June for accepting bribes from an education ministry official.

Venezuela repealed portions of laws governing foreign exchange, enabling businesses and individuals to swap money at designated trading houses and increasing access to hard currency after more than a decade of strict controls.

The changes passed by the politically omnipotent constituent assembly Thursday are to take effect Aug. 20, when the government is simultaneously planning to slash five zeroes off denominations of its near-worthless bolivar currency. Inflation that could reach 1 million percent this year and a deep depression have forced President Nicolas Maduro to begin dismantling a Byzantine system that has left citizens desperate for food and medicine.

“I don’t think it will significantly change the Venezuelan economy,” said Francisco Ibarra, director at Econometrica.

– Appeal-democrat news services