Deaths in Puerto Rico Disaster

Of course death is not the only measure of the severity of a natural disaster, but even if that's your only yardstick, it's worse in Puerto Rico than you're being told. (Dolt 45 famously compared 16 deaths in Puerto Rico to the thousands in New Orleans during Katrina as if to say Hurricane Maria was nothing.)

At Vox, we decided to compare what the government has been saying with other reports of deaths from the ground. We searched Google News for reports of deaths in English and Spanish media from Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria. We found reports of a total of 81 deaths linked directly or indirectly to the hurricane. Of those, 45 were the deaths certified by the government. The remaining 36 deaths were confirmed by local public officials or funeral directors, according to the reports. We also found another 450 reported deaths, most of causes still unknown, and reports of at least 69 people still missing.

  Vox

And I'll wager that there will be even more as a result of water-borne bacterial infections that don't get treated.

Indeed, as each day passes, Puerto Ricans on the island without clean water are becoming more susceptible to disease, says Andrea Dunne-Sosa, who is overseeing a medical relief team from Project HOPE, which deployed to the island after the storm.

[...]

At a Sunday news conference, Karixia Ortiz, press officer for the Department of Public Safety, said that “every death must be confirmed by the Institute of Forensic Science, which means either the bodies have to be brought to San Juan to do an autopsy or a medical examiner must be dispatched to the local municipality to verify the death,” according to an audio recording obtained by Huffington Post.

John Mutter, a disaster researcher at Columbia University who studied the death toll in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, says he’s skeptical of this methodology. “This is the way to go about it if you want to come up with smallest number possible,” he said, adding he suspects the death toll in Puerto Rico from Maria should already be in the hundreds based on what’s known about the conditions on the ground.

[...]

According to El Vocero newspaper, 350 bodies are being stored at the Institute of Forensic Sciences (equivalent to the state medical examiner's office), many of which are still awaiting autopsies. In the report, Héctor Pesquera, secretary of the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety, did not say how many, if any, of the cadavers were there before the storm.

Undoubtedly relatively few.

(On Sunday, Pesquera denied claims that there was a backlog of unexamined bodies.)

Somebody had a talk with Mr. Pesquera.

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground remains life-threatening in some areas. And reporters and first responders are continuing to paint a much more aggressive picture about life and death on the island.

[...]

The ideal way to calculate the death toll from the storm, [Mutter] says, is to count all the deaths in the time since the event, and then compare that number to the average number of deaths in the same time period from previous years. Subtract the average number from the current number and that’s the death toll.