Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rico is thousands higher than official count, study estimates

= Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rico is thousands higher than official count, study estimates = by Daniella Silva, Tampa Tribune,

April 2, 2018

"Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria." Thousands more people died after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in September than the island's government has acknowledged, according to a Harvard study published Tuesday.

The official estimate issued by the Puerto Rican government was that 64 people died in the storm. But by comparing the overall death rate on the island to the same period the year before, the Harvard study found that 4,645 more people died between Sept. 20 and Dec. 31, 2017, than in that same period in 2016.

That represents a 62 percent increase in the island's mortality rate over that year, which the study attributed to Maria.

"Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria," the researchers wrote in the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. "A major factor driving these numbers is the inconsistency of records kept of evacuees during the crisis, and independent agencies' inability to account for people now missing from census records. In short, as many as 2,500 people who lived on the island last year are unaccounted for; authorities cannot show conclusive records of whether or not they left the island, or if made it to Florida and then relocated. For now, there is a real possibility that many of them were lost in or after the storm."

And the researchers added that because they could not look into each death, they adjusted their calculations and estimated that the number of actual deaths could exceed 5,740.