Hurricane Maria last year claimed the lives of 4,645 people in Puerto Rico and not the 64 long pegged by the island’s government as the official death toll, according to a survey of thousands of residents by a research team led by Harvard University.
The researchers estimated that most victims of the storm died between Sept. 20 and Dec. 31 last year as a direct or indirect result of Puerto Rico’s worst natural disaster in 90 years. One-third perished because of delayed or interrupted medical care.
While cautioning that the estimate of 4,645 victims might be too low, the researchers said the numbers “underscore the inattention of the US government to the frail infrastructure of Puerto Rico.”
The tally, reported online on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is likely to be controversial, because it is far higher than previous independent estimates.
The emergency response to the disaster became highly politicized and provoked criticism of US President Donald Trump, who was faulted when much of the US territory went without power for months.
Puerto Rico’s government released a statement on Tuesday welcoming the study and saying that it would analyze it further.
In the aftermath of the storm, Puerto Rico commissioned George Washington University to conduct an independent study into the death toll, the results of which are due soon.
“As the world knows, the magnitude of this tragic disaster caused by Hurricane Maria resulted in many fatalities. We have always expected the number to be higher than what was previously reported,” Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration Executive Director Carlos Mercader said in the government statement.
The chief author of the new study, Caroline Buckee of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, did not respond to e-mails requesting comment.
Maria, a major hurricane with winds close to 241kph, caused an estimated US$90 billion in damage to an island already struggling economically and many residents have subsequently left.
There is a wide margin for error in the study authored by Buckee.
While the researchers estimated 4,645 deaths, the actual number could be as low as 793 and as high as 8,498, the study showed.
The tally of 4,645 dead is more than four times greater than an estimate in December last year by the New York Times, which said that the actual death toll was probably about 1,052.
A Pennsylvania State University study put the number at 1,085.
Buckee’s team randomly conducted in-person surveys of 3,299 of the estimated 1.1 million Puerto Rican households earlier this year, making sure to include remote areas.
Respondents were not paid and were asked if a household member had died directly or indirectly as a result of the storm. Missing people were not counted as deaths.
Respondents were also asked about deaths within a five-minute walking distance of their homes.
The Buckee team also said that in the aftermath of the storm, households went an average of 68 days without water, 84 days without electricity and 41 days without cellphone coverage.
In the most remote areas, 83 percent of the households were still without power by Dec. 31.
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