Nearly 1,000 More People Died in Puerto Rico After Hurricane María - Latino USA
▻http://latinousa.org/2017/12/07/nearly-1000-people-died-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO – It’s official. In the 40 days after Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico, at least 985 additional people died, when compared to the same period in 2016.
And if the entire months of September and October are included (since Hurricane Irma also passed through the island days before María), the figure rises to 1,065 deaths—despite the fact that Puerto Rico would have lost over 100,000 inhabitants due to migration this year, according to estimates from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies of The City University of New York.
Since September 20, the day when the historic Category 4 storm struck the entire island with 155-mile-per-hour winds that left Puerto Rico without power, the average daily death rate increased by 43% with peaks of about 80% on days like September 21 and 25. In October, deaths increased by 23.3%.
This new data confirms the findings of a September 28 CPI investigation, revealing that at that time there were dozens and possibly hundreds of deaths linked to the hurricane, contrary to the official government death toll, which remained at 16 victims during the first two weeks of the emergency. Today, more than two months after the catastrophe, the official death count stands at 62, due to the poor methodology being used to analyze and account for cases, according to reporting by the CPI.
The revelation of this new data also coincides with accounts from relatives’ reports of victims that point to problems with essential health services such as dialysis, ventilators, oxygen, and other critical circumstances caused by the lack of power in homes and hospitals throughout Puerto Rico.
Demographer José A. López, the only person at the registry in charge of analyzing this data, said in an interview with the CPI that the trend of increase in deaths in the first two post-Maria months is significant. He also said the government’s inability to link more deaths to the hurricane shows that the current process to document causes of death in a disaster is not working and must be reformed. Last week, as part of an investigation of the failures in the process of accounting for deaths linked to María, López and the Department of Health appeared before Puerto Rico’s Senate to request that a dialogue begin about this issue and that they lead the process to change the system.