When he visited Puerto Rico in October, Donald Trump was full of praise about the low death toll (16 people) resulting from Hurricane Maria. Since then, the reported number of deaths has climbed and is now 58. While the Puerto Rican government continues to use this number as its official count, researchers and journalists disagree. They say the number is potentially 20 times higher—and are listing a figure closer to 1,085.
[Alexis Santos, a demographer based at Penn State and Jeffrey Howard, an independent health scientist and epidemiologist] used the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics System to compare the historical averages for September and October of the past seven years to the total number of September and October 2017 deaths recently reported by the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety to see if there were notable differences.
The results were staggering: They found that in September 2017 — the month that Maria hit — there were 518 more deaths than the recent historical average for September and 567 more deaths in October 2017 than the recent historical average for October. That’s a total of 1,085 deaths likely linked to the hurricane. And given that widespread power outages have continued into November, the number of indirect deaths from the hurricane is probably higher still.
This much higher count is in line with the beliefs of journalists and media outlets that refuse to believe that the powerful Category 4 storm which devastated the island would have caused such a low number of deaths. Outlets such as Vox, CNN, and the Puerto Rico-based Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI) have been investigating and reporting for some time now that there is much evidence to suggest that the Puerto Rican government has vastly underreported the death count.
The government tried to put the issue to rest forever in a press conference on November 8 that was intended to provide reporters with more details about how it had calculated the official toll, by then 55.
"We want to explain this to you all so that all doubts about how we counted the deaths will finally end here," Héctor Pesquera, head of the Department of Public Safety, said.
But instead of resolving doubts, officials presented new data suggesting that the true number is likely much higher (the same data that Santos and Howard used in their analysis). According to the government, there were a little under 3,000 deaths registered on the island in September 2017. That's over 500 more deaths than were reported in September 2015 and 2016.
Part of the issue here is that the Puerto Rican government has only been counting deaths that have specifically listed storm-related causes on the death certificate. Additionally, there are no required guidelines for medical examiners in terms of what constitutes a storm-related death, at neither the federal nor state level. So it’s essentially up to the individual examiner to classify a death as caused by the hurricane. Moreover, there are many bodies on the island which have yet to be examined. As of early November, there were 388 bodies at the Bureau of Forensic Science and not all had been autopsied. Officials also seem not to be counting the people who died in hospitals that lost power (like those on ventilators) because of the storm.
Ensuring this data is accurate may seem unimportant to some in the wake of the long road ahead in the island’s recovery. But it does make a difference in terms of how resources are allocated and how we understand the full picture of all that has occurred as a result of Hurricane Maria.
As it stands, the federal government is already reducing its efforts related to emergency response. Yet we know that power generation on the island is only somewhere around 60 percent—and that number doesn’t represent consumption. In other words, though the numbers say the majority of power is back up, we have no idea how many people actually have it and are using power in their homes, places of business, etc. And many residents are still without access to food and clean drinking water.
Don’t be fooled. The situation in Puerto Rico is still life or death—no matter how differently the government tries to sell it.
Underreporting the number of people who died from the storm is serious, writes Carlos Yordán, an economist and international relations professor at Drew University.
It damages trust in government, reinforcing views that public officials will always put politics before the needs of the people they represent, he writes. It also lets government officials off the hook from doing the hard work needed to prevent mass casualties from future storms.
"[It] minimizes the need for a full fledge[d] investigation to determine if some of these deaths could have been prevented, or whether the island’s medical facilities were negligent in terms of providing treatment to their most vulnerable patients," writes Yordán, who is from Puerto Rico.
While natural disasters can’t be blamed on any one person or group, governments can certainly do their job to prepare for them and work efficiently to respond and mitigate some of the damage. This is a tragedy for Puerto Rico which will impact the island for generations. And while the storm itself wasn’t man-made (though we can debate the role climate change played in its ferocity), the horrific response and lack of accountability is most certainly man-made. And that is one of the most tragic parts of all in this entire disaster.