Report: Nearly 3,000 deaths linked to hurricane

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico in the desperate, sweltering months after the storm — almost double the previous government estimate — with the elderly and impoverished hit hardest, according to an independent study ordered by the U.S. territory.

The new estimate of 2,975 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 and knocked out the entire electrical grid was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. It was released Tuesday.

The 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 study caused Gov. Ricardo Rossello to raise the official death toll to 2,975 and create both a commission to implement recommendations in the new report, and a registry of the people expected to be most most vulnerable in a future storm, such as the elderly, bedridden or kidney-dialysis patients.

The number of dead has political implications for the Trump administration, which was accused of responding halfheartedly to the disaster. Shortly after the storm, when the official death toll stood at 16, President Trump marveled over the small loss of life compared to that of “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 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, a New York Democrat, 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 in a statement.