He’s hedging on any possibility of incompetent action in the hurricane Florence response and trying to deflect from the Woodward book among other things.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
The GWU report discusses the estimate of excess mortality due to the hurricane:
Total excess mortality post-hurricane using the migration displacement scenario is estimated to be 2,975 (95% CI: 2,658-3,290) for the total study period of September 2017 through February 2018.
[...]
We estimate that in mid-September 2017 there were 3,327,917 inhabitants and in mid-February 2018 there were 3,048,173 inhabitants of Puerto Rico, representing a population reduction by approximately 8%. We factored this into the migration “displacement scenario” and compared it with a “census scenario,” which assumed no displacement from migration in the hurricane’s aftermath. We found that, historically, mortality slowly decreased until August 2017, and that rates increased for the period of September 2017 through February 2018, with the most dramatic increase shown in the displacement scenario accounting for post-hurricane migration.
[...]
Overall, we estimate that 40% of municipalities experienced significantly higher mortality in the study period than in the comparable period of the previous two years.
publichealth.gwu.edu/...
A less-stupid Trump (or one of his proxies) might go the next, doubling-down step and denounce the Harvard study as “elitist” to move the Overton window. More bizarre disinformation tactics would be one of the pundits claiming that like his strange unemployment/GDP index claims, that the gap between 2975 and 4645 is “too wide”.
Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria. Our estimate of 4645 excess deaths from September 20 through December 31, 2017, is likely to be conservative since subsequent adjustments for survivor bias and household-size distributions increase this estimate to more than 5000. These adjustments represent one simple way to account for biases, but we have made our data publicly available for additional analyses. Our estimates are roughly consistent with press reports that evaluated deaths in the first month after the hurricane.8,29-33 Our estimates also indicate that mortality rates stayed high throughout the rest of the year. These numbers will serve as an important independent comparison to official statistics from death-registry data, which are currently being reevaluated,13,34 and underscore the inattention of the U.S. government to the frail infrastructure of Puerto Rico.