Study: Official death toll from Maria is way off
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, 70 other fatalities in the U.S. 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 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 Sept. 20, 2017. The study authors noted that several “independent investigations” have put the true number “in excess of 1,000.”
With sustained winds of up to 155 miles per hour 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.
During the storm itself, residents might be hit by flying debris or swept away in flash floods. In the aftermath of the storm, deaths could be attributed to lingering safety problems, illnesses brought on by unsanitary conditions or the “loss of necessary medical services,” they wrote.
To get a better handle of the storm’s true impact, interviewers fanned out across Puerto Rico between mid-January and late February. They knocked on doors and talked to adults from 3,299 households, which represented 9,522 people. Among other things, they asked whether anyone in the household died between the day Maria hit the island and the end of the year.
Among the deaths the researchers tallied through their survey, nearly 1 in 10 were a direct result of the storm, and one-third could be traced to “delayed or prevented access to medical care” as a result of the storm.