Somebody really should pull the plug on Trump watching Fox News because he truly has no clue what has gone on in Puerto Rico or what is about to take place in the next few days as stories of the real death toll start to roll in. He insulted the people of Puerto Rico this morning with his insane insistence that the official death toll of sixteen, a toll which has not officially changed in six days, is the real toll, when unfortunately, reality is rearing its ugly head all over parts of the island not previously heard from due to communication blackout. Trump actually had the hubris to say Maria was not a “real catastrophe.”
"...but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous -- hundreds and hundreds of people that died -- and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering ... no one has ever seen anything like this. Sixteen people certified. Sixteen people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people and all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody watching can really be very proud of what's taken place in Puerto Rico."
Unfortunately, outside of the Fox fueled portals of Trump’s fevered imagination, reality is much different, and considerably grimmer. Miami Herald:
Sources from nine hospitals, police and various mayors’ offices, told the CPI last week that the official death toll from Hurricane Maria was wrong and that there were at least several dozen additional victims, possibly hundreds.
The sources indicated that the morgues at many hospitals were at full capacity, information that was confirmed by Health Secretary Rafael Rodríguez-Mercado, who also said that at least three hospitals in the western area had notified him of seven additional hurricane victims and that there were reports of people who had buried relatives in mass graves given the impossibility of communication and transportation due to the storm.
There’s no more room in the morgue and body bags are full, so military procedures have been resorted to to process dead bodies — but Donald Trump doesn’t know any of this, apparently, although he’s the titular commander in chief.
Meanwhile, he [Puerto Rico Public Safety Secretary Hector Perquera] said the federal government would bring 10 morgue-containers to add 360 additional spaces for bodies to the 295 slots available at the Institute of Forensics Sciences (ICF in Spanish). Additionally, there are 41 forensic pathologists from the U.S. Department of Health on their way to Puerto Rico to provide support to the overloaded operation, Pesquera said. [...]
“I believe there are more dead, but I don’t have reports telling me [for example] eight died in Mayagüez because they lacked oxygen, that four died in San Pablo because they did not receive dialysis,” Pesquera said.
The CPI [Center for Investigative Journalism, initials CPI in Spanish] has learned that ICF’s area to receive and release corpses at the government Medical Center where several of those containers are already located has been militarized with tanks and troops from the United States Mortuary Affairs Unit.
Tanks, troops and the military are mobilized to process the dead that Trump just went on world television to say didn’t exist. Plus, Pesquera says because he’s not able to communicate with much of the island and because 70% of the hospitals were closed when the hurricane initially hit that he doesn’t know how many patients died because of crucial services denied them.
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Even Governor Richard Rossello, the “Ricky” to whom Trump has tweeted praise because of his gratitude for the “incredible” efforts Trump’s administration has purportedly made on Puerto Rico’s behalf, told CNN earlier today, "I've established from the get-go that due to the magnitude of this event it is likely that that number [death toll] is going to go up,"
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It’s more than likely it is guaranteed. It’s just a matter of paperwork trailing activity in the field. Trump is clueless because he lives in an adamantine echo chamber where Fox News tells him what he wants to hear. When the real scope of Hurricane Maria is understood in terms of human life, it’s not going to be a “good news story.” Not by a hell of a long shot.