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More than eight months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the island’s government still maintains that the official death toll from the storm is 64 people. This has been the subject of vigorous debate since we know for certain that much of the island went without power, food, clean water, and vital medical supplies for several months. Journalists, researchers, and medical professionals have estimated that the death toll is well into the thousands. And now, according to a new study released on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the newest estimate totals nearly 6,000.
BuzzFeed reports that researchers across the country worked to survey households across the island in order to obtain this important information.
The study estimates that 5,740 people died as a result of the storm, rather than the 64 people counted in the Puerto Rican government’s official death toll, last updated on Dec. 4. The government’s count came under suspicion first by the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Reporting and BuzzFeed News just days after the hurricane devastated the island. [...]
The researchers, from Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, worked with graduate students at the Carlos Albizu University and Ponce Health Sciences University in Puerto Rico, and others in Colorado and Boston, to conduct a survey of 3,299 randomly selected households in Puerto Rico — about 9,522 people.
They asked about all deaths and their causes between Sept. 20, when Hurricane Maria made landfall, and Dec. 31 of 2017.
Comparing those results with previous years’ death records, they calculated that 4,645 more people died in the final months of 2017, after the hurricane, compared with the same period the year prior — representing a 62% increase in the mortality rate after Maria.
This estimate is nearly 70 times higher than that of the Puerto Rican government’s. So how exactly can this be happening, and what in the world is going on there?
Apparently, the Puerto Rican government does not have a clear methodology for capturing, recording, and certifying hurricane-related deaths. In other words, there is no unified system or set of factors used to track deaths, which means that medical examiners were significantly undercounting the number of people who died because of the storm. On an island that supposedly prepares for hurricane season every year, this is really unacceptable. In fact, it’s downright negligent.
The low death count began to raise flags several weeks after the storm—especially when a government agency admitted that it had no concrete policy for recording hurricane-related deaths.
Experts who work in disaster death toll assessment also raised red flags early on about the Puerto Rican government’s lack of clarity on how it was determining what was — and what was not — a hurricane-related death.
Puerto Rico's Department of Public Safety told BuzzFeed News in October that it was not using any specific guidelines for deciding what was counted as a hurricane-related death. [...]
“Although direct causes of death are easier to assign by medical examiners, indirect deaths resulting from worsening of chronic conditions or from delayed medical treatments may not be captured on death certificates,” [the researchers of the recent study] wrote.
Accurately collecting this kind of information is important for several reasons. Having an accurate count of hurricane-related deaths helps officials to understand and measure the magnitude of a disaster while also providing insight into vulnerable populations. This data is critical for future disaster response and planning. But this is also an issue of government transparency and accountability.
Why are the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments so miserably failing the island’s residents? While the Puerto Rican government and FEMA are still, in theory, working together, there are no plans in place that help to identify vulnerable populations on the island which could be impacted in disasters such as hurricanes. So, while they’ve stocked up new warehouses with supplies and updated an emergency communication system, they still don’t have procedures to help the folks who will be most in need.
Moreover, one disaster expert says that Donald Trump’s visit to the island and his proclamation that everyone should be proud that only 16 people had died might have really hurt the chances of getting an accurate death toll. Robert Jensen, CEO of Kenyon International, worked with FEMA on the Hurricane Katrina response. He said the following, per BuzzFeed:
“Maybe they felt 64 people was a marker of success,” Jensen said, adding that Trump could have sent in resources to prevent further deaths after he visited Puerto Rico in October, if the president had had a more realistic count of how many people were dying at that time.
“The sad thing is he probably actually had the ability to impact the death toll at that time because I think he was there pretty early,” he said. “There was probably still time to impact by mobilizing resources or getting people to look and say, 'Who do we need to evacuate?'”
Once again, so much of the tragedy of Hurricane Maria would have been preventable if there were adequate response plans in place. Even still, after so many Puerto Ricans have endured months-long suffering because of this disaster, it seems that the island’s government nor our federal government have learned much that they can put to good use. People have died and we can’t get an accurate count of their deaths.
The governor of Puerto Rico claims to have launched an independent study to get answers, and that study has been delayed. Another internal report commissioned by the government was never released. And FEMA and Puerto Rican authorities still have not planned who to evacuate in vulnerable areas during the next hurricane. The next hurricane season begins on June 1 and it seems no one in charge is taking this seriously enough.
It’s been more than eight months. How many Puerto Ricans have to die before the government gets this right?