Officials in Puerto Rico say that 64 people lost their lives after Hurricane Maria slammed into the island in September. A new report says that estimate is off by about 4,600.
If the analysis is correct, it means that for every hurricane-related death thats currently on the books, another 70 fatalities in the U.S. territory have gone uncounted.
Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria, researchers concluded in a study published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
This isnt the first time people have questioned the official estimate of the number of deaths that ensued after the then-Category 4 hurricane made landfall on Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017. The study authors noted that several independent investigations have put the true number in excess of 1,000.
One of them was by Alexis Raul Santos, a demographer at Pennsylvania State University, and independent researcher Jeffrey Howard. In November, they concluded that Puerto Rico had experienced an excess of roughly 1,100 deaths in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
The new study adds to the growing consensus that the deaths have been undercounted, Santos said.
And not a moment too soon, said Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of Puerto Ricos capital city of San Juan.
It took too long to understand the need for an appropriate response was NOT about politics but about saving lives, Cruz said on Twitter. These deaths and the negligence that contributed to them cannot be forgotten. This was, and continues to be, a violation of our human rights.
With sustained winds of up to 155 mph and heavy rains that caused catastrophic flooding, there were many ways for Hurricane Maria to kill, explained the team led by Nishant Kishore of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
During the storm itself, residents might be hit by flying debris or swept away in flash floods. In the aftermath, deaths could be attributed to lingering safety problems, illnesses brought on by unsanitary conditions or the loss of necessary medical services, the authors wrote.
To get a better handle of Marias true impact, interviewers fanned out across Puerto Rico between mid-January and late February. They knocked on doors and talked to adults from 3,299 households, which represented 9,522 people. Among other things, they asked whether anyone in the household died between the day the hurricane hit the island and the end of the year.
More than 93 percent of people invited to take the survey agreed to do so. They received no payment or other form of assistance from the researchers.
The researchers used these responses to calculate that between Sept. 20 and Dec. 31, there were about 14.3 deaths per 1,000 Puerto Ricans. Given the uncertainties inherent in their survey, the true mortality rate could have been as low as 9.8 deaths or as high as 18.9 deaths per 1,000 residents, they wrote.
According to Puerto Ricos Department of Health, the mortality rate for the same period in 2016 was 8.8 deaths per 1,000 people. That means there was at least 0.9 of an additional death per 1,000 people in 2017, and perhaps as many as 10 extra deaths per 1,000 people.
When the researchers extrapolated those mortality rates to the population of Puerto Rico, they calculated that the number of hurricane-related deaths was somewhere between 793 and 8,498. The midpoint of that range was 4,645.
