After study, Puerto Rico raises storm toll to 2,975
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico’s governor raised the island’s official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975 Tuesday after an independent study found that the number of people who died in the desperate, sweltering months after the storm had been severely undercounted.
The new estimate of nearly 3,000 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 and knocked out the electrical grid 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,” Gov. Ricardo Rossello told reporters. “I think the lesson is to anticipate the worst.”
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.
“A lesson from this is that efforts for assistance and recovery need to focus as much as possible on lower-income areas, on people who are older, who are more vulnerable,” said Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute.
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 Sept. 20 hurricane was low, in part, because doctors were not trained in how to classify deaths after a disaster.
The number of deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 was 22 percent higher than the same period in previous years, Goldman said.
The number of dead has political implications for the Trump administration, which was accused
of responding half-heartedly to the disaster.
Shortly after the storm, when the official death toll stood at 16, President Donald Trump marveled over the small loss of life compared with that of “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”
Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in August 2005, was directly responsible for about 1,200 deaths, according to the National Hurricane Center. That does not include indirect deaths of the sort the George Washington researchers counted in Puerto Rico.
Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., said the report shows the U.S. government failed the people of Puerto Rico.
“These numbers are only the latest to underscore that the federal response to the hurricanes was disastrously inadequate, and as a result, thousands of our fellow American citizens lost their lives,” she said.
There is no national standard for how to count disaster-related deaths. Though the National Hurricane Center reports only direct deaths, such as those caused by flying debris or drowning, some local governments may include indirect deaths from such things as heart attacks and house fires.
Researchers with George Washington University said they counted deaths during the span of six months — a much longer period than usual — because so many people were without power then.
“That caused a number of issues,” Goldman said, adding that people were forced to exert themselves physically or were exposed to intense heat without fans or air conditioning. “It’s fairly striking that you have so many households without electricity for so long. That’s unusual in the U.S. after a disaster.”
Puerto Rico’s government released data in June showing increases in several illnesses in 2017 that could have been linked to the storm: Cases of sepsis, a serious bloodstream infection usually caused by bacteria, rose from 708 in 2016 to 835 last year.
Deaths from diabetes went from 3,151 to 3,250, and deaths from heart illnesses increased from 5,417 to 5,586.
Bethzaida Rosado said government and healthcare officials were not prepared for the storm, and she is still angry that her 76-year-old mother died because oxygen tanks were not available on the island after the hurricane.
“Do you know what it’s like to see your mother run out of oxygen?” she said. “I don’t wish that on anyone.”
Months ago, the Rossello administration stopped updating its official death toll at 64 and ordered the independent investigation amid suspicions the dead were substantially undercounted.