President Donald Trump made headlines last week when he called into question estimates of the death toll from Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“When Trump visited the island territory last October, OFFICIALS told him in a briefing 16 PEOPLE had died from Maria.” The Washington Post. This was long AFTER the hurricane took place. Over many months it went to 64 PEOPLE. Then, like magic, “3000 PEOPLE KILLED.” They hired….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2018
….GWU Research to tell them how many people had died in Puerto Rico (how would they not know this?). This method was never done with previous hurricanes because other jurisdictions know how many people were killed. FIFTY TIMES LAST ORIGINAL NUMBER – NO WAY!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2018
The “3000” death toll Trump is quoting is the conclusion from a George Washington University study.
After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, the initial official death toll was 16, and later revised upward to 64.
However, that figure is just of deaths caused directly from the hurricane – while the “3000” figure is from a study that tried to estimate the number of deaths caused by hurricane-related conditions and problems after the hurricane struck (such as a lack of food and water, lack of access to medical care, etc).
The study faults Puerto Rican doctors for being poorly trained on the guidelines for attributing deaths to a disaster in death certificates, “Which meant that in the first few weeks and deaths after the storm, doctors failed to record many deaths that were indirectly related to the storm — but still worthy of inclusion in the death toll.”
Another headline-grabbing study out of Harvard University earlier this year estimated 4,645 storm-related deaths, many of which they attributed to “delayed or interrupted health care.”
Indirect deaths normally are counted in the official death tolls from natural disasters, such as hurricanes, but are the estimates accurate?
The Cato Institute, no ally of President Trump, has poked a number of holes in the two aforementioned studies rendering them useless.
- The Harvard study extrapolated from only 15 deaths reported in a survey of 3299 households to estimate that “between 793 and 8498 people died … up to the end of 2017.” By adding 793 and 8498 and dividing the result by 2, Time and others came up with a totally meaningless “average” which were widely reported with predictable sensationalism. Estimates of death from people who were interviewed are little better than an opinion poll, and finding 15 deaths out of a sample of 3299 can’t plausibly be multiplied into 4645 for the whole island.
- The GWU study is comparing the number of total deaths in the six months following the hurricane to “hypothetical simulations of what might have happened [in terms of overall deaths] without the storm.”
So, what’s the truth of the matter?
Somewhere in the middle. While the estimates of 3000-5000 deaths are sensationalized, the true number is somewhere around 1,000.
- An earlier Aug 2 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association by professors from Penn State and the University of Texas had used death certificate data 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 period from previous years.” Yet that ideal method found the number of excess deaths was 1,139 from September through December of last year.
Additionally, even a Washington Post fact checker noted in June that in total, there were “roughly around 1,000 deaths” from the hurricane.
I don’t mean to give the impression that 1,000 deaths are somehow “better” or “acceptable,” I’m merely looking to get to the truth of how many deaths Hurricane Maria caused in the territory, and the most well-constructed estimates thus far put that figure around 1,000 deaths. Trump’s figure of 64 deaths may be an underestimate, but it pales in comparisson to the erroneous figure of 3,000 deaths being peddled by the liberal media.
