What's the Story with Puerto Rico's Death Toll?
This article first appeared on on June 1, 2018
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When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last fall, it killed power to most of the island. The toll was catastrophic. Damages have been estimated at $90 billion. For months, entire cities had no electricity, sanitation, and access to health care. Which is why the government’s official death toll from the storm—64 people—always seemed suspect.
On Sunday, a team from Harvard confirmed those suspicions. In published in the New England Journal of Medicine, they showed that the hurricane killed more than 4,600 – 70 times the government’s number.
Why the difference? How can one entity count 64 people and another 4,600? When what they’re counting is something as important as dead American citizens? It turns out counting disaster deaths is harder than it sounds.