Puerto Rico’s death toll from Hurricane Maria raised to 3,000

Puerto Rico’s official death toll from Hurricane Maria, the most powerful storm to hit the Caribbean island in almost a century, was raised on Tuesday from 64, a number widely discounted as far too low, to nearly 3,000, based on a study ordered by the governor of the US territory.

The report found that an estimated 2,975 deaths could be attributed directly or indirectly to Maria from the time it struck in September 2017 to mid-February of this year.

By comparison, deaths blamed on Hurricane Katrina in 2005 ranged from about 1,200 to more than 1,800, most along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi.

The latest Puerto Rico figure was derived from comparisons

between predicted mortality under normal circumstances and deaths documented after the storm, a number that turned out to be 22 percent higher.

Researchers said they adjusted for various factors that could account for fluctuations in mortality, most notably the displacement of some 241,000 residents who fled the island in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

They also found that the poor and elderly were disproportionately hard hit in terms of risk of fatalities.

The emergency response to Maria became highly politicized as the Trump administration was castigated as being slow to recognize the gravity of the devastation and

too sluggish in providing disaster relief to Puerto Rico, an island of more than 3 million residents.

The storm made landfall with winds close to 241 kilometers per hour on September 17 and plowed a path of destruction across the island, causing property damage estimated at $90 billion.

It was the third major hurricane to hit the US with lethal force in less than a month last year, following Harvey in Texas and Irma in the Caribbean and Florida.

The disconnect between the administration’s initial sanguine assessment of the situation and the enormity of the disaster was evident 12 days into the crisis when Elaine Duke, then acting US homeland

security secretary, characterized the federal response as “a really good news story” and spoke of a “limited number of deaths.”

In a scathing reaction, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz appeared on CNN declaring, “Damn it, this is not a good news story. This is a peopleare-dying story. This is a life-ordeath story.”

In early October 2017, Trump expressed satisfaction with the federal response to Maria, saying it compared favorably with a “real catastrophe like Katrina.”